So few ingredients and so quick to make. Yet the flavor is amazing. The thick sauce that coats the noodles make this dish even better.
How can a pasta dish with nothing but sss ingredients be that good? Two things. Bacon and cream cheese.
If you haven’t heard the term “flavor carrier” yet, it refers to an ingredient that can be used sparingly but with terrific results. Cured meat, like bacon and sausage, works like that. Salted, spiced and left to soak up the seasonings, a little bacon can flavor a dish sufficiently.
To cook this pasta dish, start by boiling your noodles in salted water. That takes time so, while the noodles are rolling around in boiling water, take a frying pan and spread cut up becon rashers on the entire bottom. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the bacon is browned and fat has been rendered.
Scoop out the bacon and set aside. Into the rendered fat, drop in rinsed spinach, sprinkle in a little salt and pepper, and cook just until the spinach softens.
When the spinach has visibly wilted, tear your cream cheese and drop directly over the greens.
Stir the cream cheese into the spinach until melted. The spinach will expel enough water to create a rather thick sauce. You need to thin that out a bit with cream.
Add cooked pasta to the spinach sauce and toss to coat every piece of noodle and to distribute the spinach. Then, take your fried bacon, dump it in and give everything a gentle stir.
Bacon, spinach and cream cheese macaroni
Ingredients
- 6 to 8 bacon rashers
- 4 cups baby spinach
- salt
- pepper
- 125 grams cream cheese
- ¼ to ⅓ cup cream
- 2 to 3 cups macaroni or your preferred pasta shape cooked in salted water
Instructions
- Heat a frying pan.
- Cut the bacon into pieces about an inch wide then spread in the heated pan.
- Cook the bacon over medium heat until browned. Scoop out and set aside.
- Reheat the rendered bacon fat and drop in the spinach with about half a teaspoon of salt and a quarter teaspoon of pepper.
- Cook the spinach with occasional stirring until softened.
- Tear the cream cheese into pieces and drop into the pan with the spinach. Cook, stirring, until melted.
- Stir in the cream to make the sauce.
- Taste the sauce, and add salt and pepper, if needed.
- Dump in the cooked macaroni and toss thoroughly.
- Add the fried bacon and stir just until combined.
