Bacon and Mushroom Fettuccine

Those of you who have been following for a while will know that feeding the man here is.... Challenging! But since recovering from chemo and colon cancer, he is at least trying new foods, and even will eat pasta. Usually I make this without the bacon, but he skipped breakfast and begged for meat. It does however make enough for 2 large portions, so he ended up with leftovers for work. And as we all know, the mushrooms make everything taste "meatier" so there went another trick to lower his meat intake. I am a sneaky vegetarian after all! Ridiculously easy to make, tasty, and the ingredients are never far from the fridge.

Ingredients
1/2 onion, diced
4 mushrooms, sliced thinly
2 slices of bacon, diced
1 handful fettuccini
2 cloves of garlic
2 springs of rosemary
1 vegetable stock cube (optional)
Teaspoon olive oil
Water
Salt and pepper

Method

1. Boil water with salt. Snap fettuccine in half, and cook until nearly done... Still with a slight hardness in the middle. I like snapping it in half so it fits in a standard saucepan, and so that the man doesn't complain that it's too hard to get the pasta on the fork!

2. While pasta is boiling, heat a deep fry pan, add butter and diced onions. When onions are clear, add bacon to the pan.

3. Using a pestle and mortar, crush the garlic and rosemary, then add to the pan. Add the mushrooms and stir. Add a vegetable stock cube if you wish at this point.

4. Drain pasta, adding a few tablespoons of the boiling water to the fry pan, and add the fettuccine to the fry pan.

5. Add salt and pepper to taste. Stir until all the ingredients are mixed and the mushrooms are soft.

6. Serve and eat.

 Great for those in a rush meals. It takes less that 10 minutes from "I'm starving, what's for lunch?" to being on the plate. To change it up, sometimes I will use penne instead, and a little diced chicken instead of bacon, and a tiny tin of coconut milk. Throwing in a couple of diced green chillies then gives the whole dish a somewhat Thai flavour and the man thinks I have more exceptional cooking skills than I really do. ;) Sorry, there are no photos as the man ate it all before I could take a decent one (he was dying of starvation remember), and a plastic container for lunch just seemed less classy.