by Two recipes in one!
Here’s the deal: there are seemingly endless recipes for “Schinkennudeln” – a recipe which translates from the German as simply “ham-pasta.” It can be a casserole. It can be a near relation to Italian carbonara. In my husband’s family tradition, Schinkennudeln is made by cooking up some spaghetti, topping it with cubed ham, adding ketchup, and melting mozerella cheese. But at the cafeteria we ate at when we lived there, Schinkennudeln involved fried noodles and I eventually found a suitable recipe. The bonus recipe is for a no-carb version with riced cauliflower, which tastes better than you think it would based on the picture.
The quantities given here are for a “feed hungry boys” version and I’m really not as precise about any of this as I ought to be, but it’s a rare sort of recipe for me that I don’t actually need to use a cookbook for, though the particular recipe is a modified version of what’s found here. Is the proportion of ham to pasta right, or eggs? Who knows? As to the cauliflower version, I’m going to describe how I make the two recipes at once.
Ingredients:
8 – 12 oz cavatappi or similar pasta
butter
3 cups cubed ham (I cut up a ham when it’s on sale and freeze in 1 cup portions)
1 package riced cauliflower (usually 12 oz)
onions, maybe
1/4 – 1/3 cup heavy cream
5 – 6 eggs
nutmeg
Cut the pasta with salted water as directed on the package.
At the same time, microwave the riced cauliflower as directed.
Melt 1 tbsp butter and saute the ham (and onions) in an extra-large nonstick frying pan. Depending on the ham, there may be a lot of water cooking off that you’ll need to drain.
After the ham is cooked at least to the point that the water is cooked out, divide the ham up between the original frying pan and a smaller pan. Add the cauliflower to the smaller pan and the pasta to the larger one. (The pasta might be too much for the pan; in my household that just means there’s some left for another meal.) Add more butter to each of the pans and fry the ham and the pasta/cauliflower until the pasta and cauliflower are (at least partly) browned (yes, if the pans weren’t so crowded there would be more browning; there are tradeoffs).
In the meantime, beat together the eggs and add in the cream. When the nudeln/cauliflower seem sufficiently browned, add in the egg-cream mixture to the two pans in rough proportion to the food. Mix it together and let cook, stirring occasionally, until the eggs are cooked through. Sprinkle the dishes with nutmeg and stir it in.
That’s it! It’s yummy and it’s easy except the frying takes longer than you expect and of course you have to start with cubed ham.
Enjoy!
