Cacio e pepe is a typical Roman cuisine recipe for typically bucatini (perciatelli) pasta but it can also be done with other shapes. But although we love cacio e pepe when we are in Rome, our attempts to capture this dish stateside have been just a hair short of our memories, and let's face it, carbs and cheese has a bad rep. Adding legumes makes it more palatable to our nutrition conscience. We stumbled onto this because we had some frozen favas in our freezer, and needed a supper idea, so searching the web for fava and pasta led to the NYTimes, a site that has offered us some successful ideas in the past, so we decided to go with it.
We had everything we needed on hand. Just a matter of following the directions upon return from our fitness center visit. Another success story for the dr bob and ms ani cooking team. We had half a box of bucatini left over in our pasta stash, so we replaced the spaghetti with our insider knowledge as honorary Romans, and this was a two person half pound pasta recipe, perfect! We had chives in the freezer but forgot them. Next time. We polished off the whole thing with an avocado, EVOO, black pepper, pressed garlic and Herbamore seasoning salt salad. And some Sicilian red wine.