Carbonara is one of those authentic pasta dishes you do not mess with. That is, to avoid criticism from others, you stick as close to the original recipe as possible. But when you see all of these Italian pastas as a technique rather than a recipe, you can change the core ingredients to suit your palate and ingredients. Calling it carbonara is problematic because essentially it is not carbonara anymore when you change the recipe or ingredients. But this should not be a problem. I think the base recipe or technique for carbonara is an awesome one in which you can substitute the meat for herbs.

Fresh herbs from your garden are the best. For one, you know what goes into the ground and the growing conditions of your food, but you also become intimately connected with nature around you. You also start to eat more seasonally. Some foods cannot grow in, say, the summer, but sometimes they are available at the shops. Your body does not necessarily want that food at that time of the year.

In South Africa, we call amaranth and such plants Marog. In this recipe, I will show you how I substitute marog and other freshly harvested herbs from my garden with the meat component in traditional carbonara. This is obviously not a traditional recipe. However, I use the technique of making carbonara in addition to the sautéed herbs. Please follow along to see my method of making this non-traditional pasta and see how easy it is to add more herbs into your diet. At the end of the post I muse a little on the natural medicine aspect of herbs and how I use them as preventative medicine rather than curative medicine.

A disclaimer: practicing herbalism requires you to always positively identify wild herbs, especially if you did not plant them yourself. Do your part by not picking a herb and consuming it if you are not 100% sure of what it is.

Ingredients

For this recipe you will need the following:

• Pasta,
• freshly harvested herbs (I used, amaranth, lamb's quarters, and purslane),
• egg,
• hard cheese,
• salt and pepper.

Method

Carbonara and similar styles of pasta dishes are basically emulsification sauces. If you understand emulsification, this recipe will be easy. If not, remember you want to emulsify fat with the pasta water. This is what will give you that silky smooth sauce people want. Adding an egg complicates it a bit, but the properties of the egg can help with the end sauce being rich and creamy. But it can scramble! So, be careful.

Step 1: Cut the Herbs

I like to roll all of the leaves into a "sausage" and cut it across. This will give you crosswise strips. I cut thes crosswise again to make small cubes. They are perfect for this sauce and pasta shape in my view.

Step 2: Sauté the Herbs

In a pan, I add coconut oil and I sauté the herbs just until they get a brown-caramelized flavor. This does not take long. You can do this while the pasta is cooking and is almost done.

Step 3: Make the Sauce

In a separate bowl, add the egg and cheese and mix. This will be the base of your sauce. Again, do this whilst the pasta is cooking.

Step 4: Assemble

In the bowl where you started the sauce, add some pasta cooking water. This will temper the eggs so that they will not scramble. Add the sautéed herbs and then the cooked pasta. Vigorously stir the pasta so that the excessive heat cooks the eggs and the sauce is made. I added a little too much pasta water, so my sauce was a little loose. You can attempt to rectify this by slowly heating the bowl you just used to mix the pasta in over the cooking water. This will thicken the sauce. Due to the herbs containing water as well, the sauce will be a bit more watery.

Step 5: Plate

And now you can plate. Add some extra cheese and pepper. Enjoy your hard work! (Below, I will write something on my way of using herbs as medicine in my diet, if you'd like to read on about that.)

Natural Medicine and Herbs as Preventative Measure

I like to think about my body as a type of engine. (Already, this way of thinking about it might be wrong but this analogy in some sense works for me.) If you provide this engine with bad gasoline, it will not last very long. Yes, it will run, but in the long run, it will not run as well as it could.

I use my home-grown wild herbs in this sense. Or, in other words, I see this as an active act against putting "bad gasoline" into my "engine". In some sense, I see this as preventative medicine. That is, I want to add herbs and natural medicinal plants into my everyday diet and take out things that might hamper my journey towards living healthier.

This is, in some sense, a very naive way to go about things. But I want to believe that these steps I am taking are helping my body in the long run. I can be wrong. But I also think the added benefits of gardening (e.g. more sun exposure) and getting back in touch with nature also has medicinal properties. We so often think of medicine as something that needs to cure an ailment but forget that medicine can also maintain a healthy system.

Post Scriptum

All of the images were taken with my iPhone. The herbs were grown in my garden. The musings are of my own, influenced by some wine and Saturday creativity. I hope you try this recipe and please let me know if it was any good! Enjoy, and happy cooking.