Another pasta idea

The inspiration for this came from a recipe in Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern Cooking - one of my all-time favorite cookbooks. It doesn't involve bacon, surprise surprise, it involves stewing beef for over an hour. I didn't feel like doing that tonight, but I saw a recipe on Epicurious for a bacon-tomato-onion pasta that looked sort of mediocre, and I thought hmmm, what if I combine the two, and season the boring pasta recipe with Roden's suggested spices? Voila! Delicious dinner.

Yeah - not the most appealing picture. I dunno why it looks so... pink.

To create, you need

4 slices bacon

1 onion

1 tomato

cumin, salt, allspice, cayenne, cinnamon, ginger, chili powder

pasta

Chop up the bacon and fry it up on medium heat. Meanwhile, set the water to boil, with salt and get to work chopping the onions. At some point in this process your water will boil, and when it does, add the pasta.

Once the bacon is mostly done, reduce the heat to low, push the bacon to one side and add the onions. Saute a few minutes until soft, using the time to chop up the tomato. Add the tomato, and then the spices - basically, as much cayenne as you want, depending on how much spice you can handle, a large pinch of everything else. Continue cooking over low heat, basically until your pasta is done - as the tomatoes cook, they sort of collapse, and the whole thing becomes a bit more saucy.

It's a really lovely dinner. I know the spices sound totally bizarre, but together, they're really quite amazing, and are wonderfully complemented by the bacon, as are the softer textures of the tomato and onion. It's an incredibly simple meal, but really quite tasty.