Failed Carbonara and tight-rope walker on World Trade Center

I love Carbonara. Simple ingredients, creamy goodness. Even though this is a simple dish, it does not mean it is easy. I still don't know how I sometimes make it good and how I sometimes mess it up. This time it was a mess up. Yes, the egg curdled and became like a scramble egg.

I don't use heavy cream for my carbonara. I mix egg and parmesan cheese with black pepper and salt.

Saute Pancetta in a pan.

When pasta is cooked, add them all together with some parsley.

It is very disappointing when you mess up your food... well, the taste was good. I just need more practice I guess. Maybe the heat was too high when I mixed everything together. This time I used real Pancetta. It gives a great flavor. My search for perfect Carbonara will continue...

In my mind, my perfect carbonara is the one from a restaurant called "Osteria" in Palo Alto, California. I love their Carbonara. I dream about it sometimes. The lady I used to live with took me there one day telling me that it is one of her favorite restaurant. It became my favorite restaurant instantly. Every time when I go back to California, I have to go to that restaurant. I don't know how they do it but their Carbonara is amazing!!!!

Anyway, I just finished this book called "Let the great world spin" by Colum McCann. It is a story about very different characters who live in NY. I will not tell its story here because I don't want to spoil it for the people who haven't read it but I liked this book. There are also many sentences which I liked from this book. This book start with a tight-rope walker who walks between World Trade Center twin towers. I did not know about it before but I found out that this tight-rope walker was an actual person who did this in 1974. It is crazy but since it was a successful walk, I guess it remained as a good memory for some people who actually experienced this incident.  If you are interested in this tight-rope walker, here is the link to Wikipedia about his details.

From what I read in Wikipedia, it seems like he did not just walk but also sat and lay on the wire. The book is not about the tight-rope walker but I thought it was a great start to capture NYC.

This book made me think quite a lot. Everyday, anywhere in any city, people lead their lives. Each of them have struggles and life is not fair sometimes but we just have to keep on going. Maybe I like it more because the location of this story was NY. It is easier to connect to the story when you can imagine the places better, I think.

There are many sentences which I liked. I will quote one of the sentences which I thought brilliant to express certain kind of feeling which is difficult to express in one word. This is a quote from "Let the great world spin" by Colum McCann P. 100 "It was like a burglar breaking into his house and trying on his slippers." I thought this was a great way to show this creepy, violated feeling which is difficult to express with words.

This is just one sentence I thought that it is cool but there are so many and some of them are very poetic.

Anyway, if you are interested in this book, here is the amazon link.