Jennie's Bacon Pasta

This is one of our favorite recipes and has become a mainstay of our dinner rotation for some time.  Jennie effectively created this dish on her own while we were in Wilmington.  We make this dish for friends on a regular basis and it can feed 4-6.  This means that it is absolutely great for left-overs.  Jen would admit that it may take a few tries to get it to your personal taste and this recipe, like most family Italian recipes, is handled more by feel than by rigid instructions. It's also much easier than you think when first reading through the below.

Ingredients

* 4-5 cloves of garlic (depends on taste and size of cloves)

* A Generous Amount of Olive Oil

* 1 lb Bacon

* 1 lb Angel Hair Pasta

* 5-6 Tomatoes on the Vine

* 2-3 Plum Tomatoes

* Fresh Basil

* Salt & Pepper

Directions

1. In an 8 quart pot, boil water for pasta.  
2. Slice bacon into approximately 1 inch wide chunks and cook in a large sauce pan.  
3. Cook the bacon to taste.
4. Depending on the amount of time you have, you can either cook you bacon prior to making pasta, or you can cook it while your water boils.  
5. Once bacon is cooked, set aside to cool a little.  
6. Drain all of the drippings from your pan, but don't wipe your pan completely clean-the "left-overs" will add good flavor to the sauce.  
7. If you have just cooked the bacon in your pan, let it cool a little.  
8. Then cover your sauce pan in olive oil-and I mean cover!  This is part of the sauce.  
9. Thinly slice all of the garlic into the olive oil (Note: Williams Sonoma makes this cool garlic press that has a mincer and a slicer!) and let it sit in the oil for awhile.  
10. While your garlic is flavoring your oil, go ahead and dice up your tomatoes into a separate bowl.  
11. Remove the tops on both types of tomatoes, but then dice everything else and keep all the juice.  
12. Go ahead and put medium high to medium heat (depending on how hot your stove runs) under your olive oil/garlic.  
13. When the olive oil starts to simmer a little and the garlic starts to turn translucent (but don't brown the garlic) go ahead and add all of your tomatoes and tomato juice.  S
14. alt and pepper the tomatoes generously-this brings their flavor out and is important in making sure the sauce isn't too bland.  
15. While the sauce is simmering, rinse and cut up your basil.  Note: I find good kitchen shears to the best way to cut up basil.  The size and amount of the basil chunks is up to you.  I love basil and so I don't mind big pieces-but my mom always sliced it very thinly.  
16. Simmer all of this together while your water is waiting to boil.  
17. Once you put in your Angel Hair (and a splash of olive oil so that it doesn't stick together), which usually takes 3-4 minutes to cook, go ahead and add your bacon back to the sauce to heat it up and to add the flavor.  
18. In these last couple of cooking minutes, go ahead and heat up the bowl you are going to put your pasta in with Super Hot water.  This way, when you put the pasta in the bowl, it won't cool off the pasta.  
19. When the pasta is cooked, drain and put into now drained pasta bowl.  I put the pasta in the bowl in sections, mixing each section with olive oil so the angel hair doesn't all stick together in clumps.  
20. Now you are pretty much done!  Depending on how I feel, sometimes I mix all the sauce together with the pasta in the bowl, or sometimes I let each person put their own sauce on.  
21. If you are serving this to others, then you can garnish with a sprig of fresh basil on top.  

This seems hard, but it really isn't and it is one of my favorite dishes!!