*Welcome to Cooking Without Recipes, in which we teach you how to make a dish we love, but don’t worry too much about the nitty-gritty details of the recipe, so you can create your own spin. *
About a year ago, cacio e pepe became my go-to. When I arrived home drunk and hungry at 1 a.m.; when I felt too broke to go out for groceries; when someone was coming over and I wanted to feed them without making a show of it; when I was in need of grade-A comfort food; I made cacio e pepe. (Found the recipe on this same site, even!) It's an easy enough recipe to memorize, and the ratios aren't too strict—really, the key is making sure you have enough pasta water in there to make your noodles glossy, and that you add an amount of black pepper that feels obscene. Toasting the pepper in butter makes you feel clever.
There are times, however, when I want a certain amount of vegetable matter on my dinner menu. Eating a salad alongside something as rich and perfect as this pasta feels silly, and distracts from what we're all here for (cheese and butter and noodles). So I began adding roasted vegetables to my cacio e pepe, an inobtrusive and healthful bonus. The following works best with short pasta, so that all the bits in your bowl are the same size. Here's how I do it:
First, roast some vegetables—small-chopped winter squash and Brussels sprouts work just as well as bitter broccoli rabe. Roast them with salt and plenty of pepper and olive oil, and maybe some hardy herbs like thyme or rosemary, if you feel like it. Bonus points if you already have roasted veg in your fridge from last night’s dinner.
Then, bring some heavily salted water to a boil; once it does, add your pasta (I like short pastas with cubed vegetables, but you do you!). While the pasta cooks, heat up some butter—a generous tablespoon per person—in a large skillet on low heat. Once it foams, crack in an ungodly amount of black pepper. Add in a ladleful of pasta water straight from the pot and bring that “sauce” to a boil.
Meanwhile, draining the cooked pasta, reserving a little extra cooking liquid. Add the pasta to the butter-pepper-sauce pan and swirl it all together. After that's all cooked for a minute, add the vegetables and a whole bunch of grated Parm or Pecorino. You want it to be glossy; if it looks dry or clumpy, add more pasta water. Taste, adjust however you like, and serve with even more (!) freshly cracked black pepper.