Bacon and the Boy

The person who is mostly repsonsible for this (besides myself) is Belle and Conor’s sitter, Celia.

On the mornings when Celia arrives to take over the household, there’s a good chance that the first thing she’s going to do, besides care for the children, is make bacon.

Sometimes she even brings her own pork stash, and after she’s fried up a few strips, she sits at the kitchen table with Conor, and they eat bacon together.

I know, this is not something a 2 year old should consume on a regular basis, unless you want him to turn into Homer Simpson. I swear he doesn’t eat it everyday. But the kid loves the stuff, and this love has proven very useful when trying to get other things into his belly. Just the other night, we were at this beyond wonderful Italian restaurant in our neighborhood called Sandro’s, and I ordered the spaghetti with pork cheeks and pancetta. Within minutes, the boy was sidling over to my side of table, saying “I sit on your lap?”, eyeing my pork pasta. He ended up polishing off most of the bowl, with his fingers, which thankfully the imposing Sandro appreciated on one his many visits out of the kitchen.

But I digress.

Another time this came in handy was when I made an “empty the pantry” pasta dish in Main, with tomatoes, bacon, scallions and parmesan.

The dish was very easy to assemble, especially after a long and tiring day at the beach, and it utilized pretty much everything we wanted to use up before the end of our stay. First, I marinated the chopped fresh tomatoes in mixture of salt, pepper, olive oil, sherry vinegar and a bit of sugar. Then I put on water to boil, and added half a box of linguine we had leftover from making pasta with clam sauce a few nights earlier. Next, I fried up about half a pound of coarsely chopped bacon in a pan. Once it was crisp, I put it aside, poured out all but a tablespoon or so of fat, and slices from the white part of three scallions.

When the scallions were soft, I poured in the tomatoes with their juices and let them simmer a bit. Once everything was bubbly and melted, I put in one can of Italian tuna (drained of it’s olive oil), mixed it all together a bit, then put in the pasta (when I drained it I made sure to reserve a 1/2 cup of the pasta water). Over low heat, I tossed everything all together, adding some pasta cooking water to make it a little saucy, and added back in the crisp bits of bacon. I finished it off with a bit of chopped basil (optional) and parmesan, and that was it. Everything married so well together, and I even got some bits of tomato past you know who.