Cream pasta

Pasta should be the easiest thing to cook in the kitchen, after all you are just adding it to boiling water. The sauces that go with the pasta however can get a little involved but once you know how to make a basic sauce from what you can buy from the supermarket, your options for pasta dishes will increase dramatically.
Today we will look at the simplest cheese sauce you will ever make.

Cheese Sauce
Preparation time: 5 min
Serves: Depends on the pasta but generally 2-4
Ingredients:
200g cream cheese
1 tsp salt
150ml cream or milk

Heat whilst whisking all of the ingredients until all cream cheese has melted into the sauce.
End.

To make a Carbonara style dish, to the sauce, add diced pancetta or if unavailable, pan fried diced bacon. Add herbs and spices to flavour (Tarragon, basil, white pepper)
To boiled pasta stir in 1 egg yolk before introducing to the sauce.
Stir pasta into the cream sauce and serve.


Your options for flavour are endless once you have the base sauce, you could try:
Chicken and mushroom
Beef Mince, tomato and olives
Go vegetarian, mushrooms, tomatoes, olives, spinach
Go Japanese Fusion, Tarako(fine roe)


Generally speaking you will want a thicker sauce for noodles and a finer sauce for penne, tortellini etc.
Finally you will want to add a small amount of water if you intend to use the sauce for a pasta bake

 So same again heat and combine cream cheese, salt, milk, and 100-200ml water.

Because the pasta will be eventually baked you need to cook the pasta till just before "firm to bite" add the HOT pasta to the sauce and bake for 20min at 180c