Heston's pea and pancetta spaghetti - with bucatini

Bucatini definitely makes my top 5 pasta shapes.

It's like spaghetti but with a hole right through the middle (buco = hole in Italian, osso buco = bone with a hole.)

 
Bucatini's great for two reasons.

You get all the joy of biting through spaghetti. 

Then you meet the hole in the middle and have a millisecond pause to process your happiness. 

Followed by even more joy when you bite through part two and get to do it all over again.  Magnificent.

The other great thing about bucatini is that if you really put your mind to it, you can whistle through it.  And you can get it from Sainsbury's.  That's three great things.

I'm a huge fan of carbonara, and I had an old Heston / Waitrose recipe card knocking about that I've been meaning to try for-ever ever.  You just can't go wrong with pasta and egg and bacon.  Heston's version also has frozen peas and chillis, and uses no cream, so is dead easy to knock up with store-cupboard stuff (well, I mean it's easy if you don't have cream in your fridge really.) 

Mr. Newman (not my husband, not my brother) was on sous-chef duty.  He did a good job chopping chilli, onion and garlic,

but then insisted on impaling my good knife on the chopping board, like a caveman.

The recipe's super easy and takes no more than ten minutes once your pasta water's boiled.  First fry the above in olive oil for five minutes, till it's soft and sweet,

then add the pancetta and cook gently for another five minutes.  Meanwhile put the pasta in the rolling, boiling water.  Rolling, boiling - this is key.

Mix egg yolks, parmesan and a bit of pasta water together,

add your frozen peas to the bacon and onion mix

Drain the pasta.  I then gave it a little visit from this delicious Sicilian single estate olive oil, new from M&S, which is as good as any really expensive olive oil out there:

Then combine everything back in the pasta pan,

leave to sit for two minutes, then add black pepper and parmesan and serve

Totally perfect mixture of richness, sweetness, saltiness and comfort.  The sort of dish you could happily eat in bed, on the sofa, or serve at a dinner party with a really good bottle of cold white or pink wine.