This is one of my favorite recipes. It's easy to make, but it tastes great! Easy as it may be, though, you'll almost surely ruin it if you don't read the whole recipe before you start cooking. That's why I gave it a 2 in Preparation Difficulty. You also have to wash the pan you cook the bacon in. I hate doing that, so I gave it a 2 in Cleaning Difficulty.

*Eating raw eggs is potentially dangerous. If the eggs have salmonella and you eat them raw, you will get salmonella. That's bad. So read the whole recipe and do just as it says so that the eggs are completely cooked. (Really, though, most eggs don't have salmonella. You eat raw eggs every time you eat cookie dough, cake batter, etc. I eat cookie dough all the time, and I have never gotten salmonella. I just threw this little note in as a CYA precaution.)

Ingredients:

4 eggs
1/2 pound bacon, preferably thick-cut
chopped, fresh garlic (about 2 cloves worth)
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
1 lb spaghetti

Serves 4 People:

Step 1
On a large skillet, cook about half a pound of bacon, more or less, depending on how bacony you like it. Take the bacon out of the grease, pat it dry with a folded paper towel, crumble it up into pieces, and set it aside.

Pour out all but about 3 or 4 tablespoons of the bacon grease from the skillet. (If you used really lean bacon you might not need to pour any of the grease out.) Then lightly saute the chopped garlic in that grease. but don't let it brown. Take the skillet off the heat and set it aside.

Step 2
Break 4 eggs in a bowl and beat them with a fork. Set the bowl of eggs aside.

Measure about 1/2 cup grated parmesan in another little bowl, and set it aside.

So now you have three little bowls of stuff: crumbled bacon, beaten eggs, and parmesan. And you have the bacon grease and garlic in the skillet.

Step 3
Cook your spaghetti however long their instructions say, and keep your garlic/bacon grease and bowl of eggs next to the sink where you are going to drain the spaghetti.

This part is important: IMMEDIATELY after you drain the spaghetti, dump it into the skillet with the bacon/garlic grease and then the eggs on top of it and stir. Stir it up so that the eggs and the grease get spread evenly over all the noodles before they start to cool off. The hot spaghetti will cook the eggs almost instantly.

If you let the spaghetti cool for even a minute before you stir it up with the grease and eggs, the spaghetti will stick together and the eggs won't get cooked completely. (You can still nuke it if you make this faux pas, but the noodles will clump together and its overall greatness will be diminished.)

Then add the parmesan and the crumbled bacon, stir it again, and season to taste with salt and pepper. It's great! If you cook it once, you'll cook it again.

If you're cooking for a date or an in-law, you might add a little chopped parsley on the side. (So it looks fancier.)