This vegetarian carbonara pasta uses yogurt to give the sauce creaminess without mounds of cheese. Instead of ham, the pasta is loaded with spring vegetables.
You can substitute anything that’s fresh in your market, but I love that asparagus and peas since they only take a minute of blanching to be al dente.
Back when I was a quarter-life cook, not a healthy hedonist, I was all about finding creative ways to cook for one. I was not gluten-free at the time, so that creative way often involved carbs. And that carb was usually pasta.
The coauthor of my first cookbook had a genius trick for a single serve vegetarian carbonara pasta recipe that ironically is also a great way to make this usually gloppy, cheese-filled dish a little healthier.
Classic carbonara uses the heat from freshly cooked pasta to warm raw egg and grated cheese into a semi-cooked, yet creamy sauce. The recipe for carbonara pasta in our cookbook uses plain Greek yogurt (pretty much 1 single serving cup) instead of the mounds of cheese (though there is some) to make the sauce equally luscious.
Since fermented foods benefit from as little cooking as possible, it’s a great way to add probiotic goodness to your pasta carbonara. The tangy yogurt is the perfect complement to spicy chili flakes and keeps things bright for spring, especially when the pasta is loaded with asparagus and peas.
Asparagus was one of those FODMAP foods that took me a while to build back into my diet. For a while last year, I was only able to eat a few spears at a time. This asparagus soup that I made last spring tasted incredibly delicious after 6 months off from so many of my favorite vegetables, but it was so good I ate too much and ended up doubled over in the fetal position.
I knew that I wanted to make this pasta for you guys, but I honestly wasn’t sure how it was going to go. So it was a small victory for me when I ate a full serving and felt fine. It’s proof that you have to keep testing and trying, slowly ramping up your quantities until you can really find food freedom.
One of the reasons I might have had an easier time with this pasta dish is that I cooked the veggies in the pasta water for a minute or so to take the bite off instead of serving them raw. This was a big learning from last week’s Spring Gut Reset for those who participated.
