Serendipity Pasta Sauce

I made my promised fallish recipe and I photographed the finished product, but I haven't gotten around to posting it yet. I will though, as soon as I'm blogging from the computer where the photograph is saved. :-P

In the meantime, here is a recipe without a photograph, because it wasn't ever intended to appear on this blog and I didn't realize that it was blogworthy until after I had licked my plate clean. Okay, so I didn't actually lick the plate. Close, though. It was that good.

Here's what happened: Last night, Dan wasn't feeling well. He started coming down with a cold. He said that for dinner, he wanted something warm and comforting... he wanted pasta.

I, on the other hand, was feeling uncharacteristically non-queasy last night, which was a small miracle (oh the joys of pregnancy!). My problem was that, like Old Mother Hubbard's, my cupboards (and frig) were bare. I haven't been grocery shopping in nearly three weeks, so coming up with a pasta dish on the fly was going to be a challenge for sure.

I started rummaging through the odds and ends around my kitchen, and here is what I collected:

-A half package of rotini noodles
-1 mostly empty carton of half-n-half
-1 mostly empty carton of whipping cream
-2 slices of (rather dried out) pepper bacon
-A leftover fourth of an onion that I forgot in the frig
-1 frozen boneless, skinless chicken breast
-1 6 oz. can of tomato paste

"Aha!" I said to myself. "Chicken carbonara tomato cream sauce something or other!" I wasn't sure how it would all taste, but I figured I could play around with some spices and at least make it passably good.

Disclaimer: This recipe is decidedly NOT low-fat, low-calorie, low-carb, or low anything. Hey, I'm pregnant.

First, I chopped up the dried-out bacon and threw it in a saute pan to render. Then, I diced up the onion (which came to about a 1/4 c.) and three garlic cloves I found in the pantry, and threw those in with the bacon. For extra fatty goodness I tossed in a couple of pats of butter, probably 2 T. worth.

While that was getting the house all nice and smoky-savory smelling, I set the frozen chicken to poach in a small pot of salted water. Then I dumped what was left of the half-n-half and cream into my bacon/onion/garlic mixture. I probably ended up getting about 3/4 of a cup total of white creamy stuff. I let the cream mixture simmer for a minute, and then I remembered that we had a bottle of sherry tucked in the back of our wine bar. I ran out to get it and dumped about a 1/4 of a cup of sherry into the cream sauce. Then I threw in some dried spices from my spice rack: about a 1/2 t. of basil, a 1/2 t. of oregano and 1 t. of parsley. I let it simmer a few minutes more and then tasted it. It needed salt. So I sprinkled in some salt and tasted it again. Better.

Up to this point, I wasn't sold on using the tomato paste. But the sauce needed another element, I decided. So I added just a tad of the paste, probably about 1 T., and tasted again. I kept adding tomato paste gradually until the sauce was a deep pinky-orange color and I had used about half the can. At that point, the sauce was perfect--savory, smoky, creamy, thick and delicious.

My chicken was done poaching so I took it out, diced it, and added it to the cream sauce. Then I boiled the rotini in the chicken stock until it was al dente.

I served the pasta and sauce with a little sprinkle of grated parmesan that I found in the freezer, but it really didn't need the cheese because it was already so rich. I also served some steamed sugar snap peas that had miraculously kept fresh in my vegetable crisper.

Hubby was happy. Very happy. Wife was happy her experiment worked. And we went to bed with happy tummies.