Pasta Carbonara

Pasta carbonara is tasty as hell, incredibly unhealthy, and was like the first thing I learned how to cook.

You'll need

Two big saucepans
a chopping board and knife
a colander
some cooking oil

Ingredients (for two servings)

200g of dry pasta, I like tagliatelle but spaghetti works well too
200g of lardons
Two eggs
150ml of cream
An onion
150g mushrooms

Method

Peel and chop the onion and mushrooms into pieces that are about as big as your thumbnail.
Heat a little bit of cooking oil in the bottom of the saucepan and gently fry the lardons. Keep 'em moving, you don't want them to stick.
After a minute or two the lardons will change colour, instead of deep red they'll be pale pink with little crunchy brown bits.
Now add the chopped onion and mushrooms. Give everything a good stir and enjoy the smell of frying onions. Drop it to a low temperature -- you don't want those onions to end up brown.
Keep stirring it from time to time to stop it sticking to the pan and burning. After a little while the onion will be translucent. That means it's time to get your pasta ready!
Boil the kettle. When it's ready, put the pasta in your second pan, dump the boiling water on it and turn the heat up to max. Make sure the water covers your pasta (unless you're using long pasta like spaghetti)
If you're using long pasta like spaghetti, you'll want to hold it upright in the pan so it doesn't hang over the side and catch on fire. Soon it'll be soft enough that you can push it all in.
The pasta will come to the boil soon enough - at which point, drop the heat down so it just simmers. Make sure to stir it from time to time, to stop the pasta sticking to itself or to the pan.
Meanwhile, all that stuff you've been frying is gonna be getting nice and soft and smelling amazing. Hope you remembered to keep stirring that as well!
Check the packet of pasta for how long it needs -- it's usually about 10 or 12 minutes of boiling. Set a timer so you don't forget! Before the pasta finishes cooking, now is a good time to separate out your eggs.
You're gonna need to separate the egg yolks from the whites. This is a bit tricky but easy to get the hang of, and when you can do it right you look really cool. Get a tumbler ready, then hold the egg in one hand and strike its shell in the middle with a table knife to make a crack. Hold it over the tumbler and use your thumbs to break the egg in two, so you have one half in each hand -- then pass the yolk between the two halves of eggshell, letting the white fall into the tumbler. Eventually all the white will be gone and one half of the eggshell will just have the yolk. Place the eggshell with the yolk back into the carton so it doesn't roll away and repeat with the other eggs.
You can throw the eggwhites in the glass away, unless you have something really cool you want to do with them.
The pasta is probably almost done by now. You can check it by fishing a bit out with a fork and tasting it: if it's soft enough to eat, then it's ready.
Pour the pasta water away through the colander and put the strained pasta in with the rest of your onions and bacon and crap. Give it a good stir so the ingredients are all mixed in the the pasta.
Pour the cream onto the pasta and ingredients. Give it a good mix, and let it thicken for a bit. If it starts bubbling, stir it and drop the heat. It's thickened nicely when it clings to the ingredients rather than pooling at the bottom of the pan.
Now turn the heat off, add your egg yolks, and give everything a good stir so that the yolks spread over it all. The pan doesn't need to be on -- the heat from the ingredients will cook your egg yolks for you.
Serve!

Variants

If you're vegetarian, you can substitute chopped halloumi for the lardons, weight for weight. You cut it into little pieces and fry it like lardons. Halloumi loves to stick to pans, so you'll need to use a low heat and your most non-stick pan and be even more vigilant than usual about stirring until you add the onions and mushrooms.
If you're vegan you're SOL with this recipe, sorry. There's probably some stuff you can do with soycream and toasted nuts but I've not tried it and I'm not gonna put any recipes here unless I can personally vouch for them being delicious.
The egg stuff sounds super complicated, huh? Just ignore it then. The recipe works fine without eggs -- it won't be quite as creamy but it'll do.
Lardons? Oh, la di da, Mr. Fancy French Man, we don't have any lardons here. Just chop up some bacon then. If you're gonna do that, try using cooking bacon instead -- it comes in big chunks which are way better for something like carbonara than the wispy thin slices you usually get from supermarkets. Lardons are way easier though, 'cause they come pre-chopped.
There are lots of cool alternatives for pasta here. I say tagliatelle or spaghetti, but really anything will work. Gnocchi is really good, too! It's potatoey and starchy and makes a big heavy comfortfood meal even heavier and more comforting. To make gnocchi you just boil it in water like you would pasta, keeping it stirred so that it doesn't stick. The only difference is that you can tell it's done when the gnocchi dumpings start floating to the surface -- this is usually after two or three minutes.
There's literally no meal that isn't improved by frying garlic along with the onions and this is no exception.
Grinding black pepper onto the finished meal is a big and clever idea. So is making a side salad, so you don't feel like you're eating something which is completely without nutritional value.