BBC Good Food Dead Good Spaghetti Carbonara

The worst thing about coming home from holiday is that after a long journey, you can't just relax.  There's no food in the house, and there's a mountain of unpacking, washing and ironing to be done.  In my case, I have to also write an eye-wateringly huge cheque to the local doggery to get my pooches back (two weeks = £408!!).  And then there's the post-holiday diet that needs to be addressed too.

So I'd planned that yesterday and today we'd have two last treats to soften the blow of an epic 12-hour car drive home (without any diversions back via North Berwick or Bempton Cliffs).  But because I'd left the blog on auto-publish and was too plain cream-crackered last night, the posts have come out the wrong way around.  So what we ate for dinner last night has become today's blog.  And today's breakfast is yesterday's post.  People who work in IT (as I do) and use technology?  A sure recipe for failure :o)

A deconstructed ham and cheese sandwich

Tea on the last night of holiday (ie the day we come home) is traditionally Chinese takeaway and I honestly wanted nothing else when we got in.  But I have a blog that needs a new recipe so I went with a simple spaghetti carbonara.  It's something that I've only ever made the husband once, back when he was still boyfriend (if that's the correct term for a 37-year-old) and that was using a tub of fresh sauce from Sainslebobs which I then proceeded to add more ham and cheese to and it still tasted vile.

It was a shame, because he basically lives on ham and cheese sandwiches so it seemed like a perfect addition to his limited eating repetoire.  I never thought about making it from scratch again until a fit of desperation when looking for simple, family friendly recipes for our holiday eating.

I was therefore sold on this recipe for two reasons.  #1 I could pick up the ingredients in an M&S Simply Food on the motorway services on the way home when we stopped for Miss A's babyccino fix.  #2 It had 'Dead Good' in the title, which is usually the sign of a winning recipe from Olive Magazine.  And, as a bonus, it used white wine which meant there was a welcome spare glass at the end of cooking.

Really simple, everyone liked it.  Just a shame that it's so fattening - a whopping 900 cals per serving, excluding garlic bread and wine - so it's definitely off the menu for the foreseeable future.

You can find the recipe here.