Filling a carbonara craving

Cheesy, golden tangle of noodles hits the lunch spot

When it comes to lunch, I’m pretty predictable: I’m generally a sandwich-or-soup kind of gal.

If I’m feeling adventurous, I’ll make the sandwich hot or the soup cold, but I’m adventurous less often than not. On the weekends, from time to time, I’ll spice it up — eschewing my normal fare for a mish-mash of cheeses and crackers and fruit and such. In a very blue moon, I’ll manage to keep my early morning hunger at bay long enough to trade lunch in for brunch.

But, it might be time to rethink my ways.

Because on Sunday, in the late morning hours just before the football games got started, I got a carbonara craving. Kevin, for his part, was all too happy to indulge my craving — as he, bless his heart, so often is. So we gathered the following:

• Pasta — opting for bucatini, which is like a fat spaghetti, with an almost indiscernable tunnel through each strand, like someone pulled a slim needle and thread, just so, from end to end;

• a pale green leek, picked up just that morning from the Nichols Farm stand at the Wicker Park Farmers Market;

• a thick-cut round of pancetta, a swirl of pink and white;

• a wedge each of Parmesan and Pecorino;

• a little hill of fresh cracked pepper, and

• a few eggs.

This promising cache of ingredients became a big bowl of pasta, swaddled in a thick, cheesy, peppery sauce and speckled with bits of pancetta and half-moons of nearly melted leek.

Atop both Kevin’s and my pasta bowls sat a gently poached egg, white and swollen.

As I held the bowl in my hand, just below my chin, and, with the tines of my fork, punctured the egg so its yellow yolk spilled onto the tangle of pasta below it, I realized: I’ve got a new lunch of choice.

Kristin Silverman is a Chicago attorney and author of the Kitchen Sink blog (thekitchensinkrecipes.com ), where this first appeared.