Sunny Anderson’s Pasta, Pancetta and Peas Is an Elegant, Easy Dish

For the ultimate easy lunch or dinner recipe, Food Network star Sunny Anderson’s Pasta, Pancetta and Peas will satisfy and impress.

Here’s how to make this incredibly easy dish.

Anderson’s recipe needs just a handful of ingredients

The culinary personality’s dish calls for seven simple items: fettuccine, diced pancetta, chopped onion, frozen peas, minced garlic, grated Parmesan, and half of a juiced lemon.

The pancetta Anderson works with in the Food Network video, link below, for this recipe is a thick cut of the Italian cured pork belly. “If you don’t have pancetta, you’re more than welcome to use bacon,” she explains.

She recommends running “your knife through your pancetta.” The goal, she said, is to “make some really nice chunks or lardons of this.” Lardon is pork fat used to flavor other foods and, in this dish, it’s especially amazing.

“We’re going to use the fat that renders from our pancetta to sautee our onions,” Anderson added. Once the pancetta pieces have been browned, she plates the crispy, salty gems, setting them to the side, cooking the chopped onions in the fat left behind.

Sunny Anderson’s recipe makes a quick and elegant meal

While the pasta cooks in the boiling water, the chef gets moving on this dish by adding the minced garlic with the nearly-translucent onions that are cooking in the pork fat.

The frozen peas are stirred in next. Anderson offers a tip for incorporating those rock-solid peas into this dish: “Take them out at the beginning [when you start cooking]; by the time they’re ready to go in, they’ve thawed just a little bit.”

The co-host of The Kitchen drains the pasta, and the cooked noodles are poured into the peas, garlic, and onion mixture. Along with the pasta, the cooked pancetta is added to the pan, as well as Parmesan cheese, “about half a cup,” Anderson suggests.

It’s all tossed in the skillet to reveal a pretty dish where the green peas stud the pasta, along with the rusty red pancetta bites and the golden flecks from the onions and garlic.

Anderson finishes this dish off with a healthy squeeze of lemon juice.

Get the complete recipe, reviews, and video on Food Network’s site.

Reviewers loved Anderson’s spin on this Italian dish

A guaranteed crowd-pleaser, Sunny Anderson’s pasta with pancetta and peas has a little something for everyone, as reviewers on Food Network’s site noted. And many took the chef up on her suggestion to substitute bacon for the pancetta.

“Great dish to make with pantry and freezer ingredients. I used bacon and freshly grated pecorino, lots of fresh black pepper and the lemon. So easy and delicious,” one home cook wrote.

Another person said, “The whole family loved this recipe! I did not have lemon juice on hand did not miss it and used whole wheat pasta for a healthier note.”

Lastly, a reviewer praised Anderson’s ratio of recipe items: “Super delicious! I was afraid that stirring the parmesan into the dish would make it too cheesy, but it was a perfect balance of all these ingredients. Definitely coming back to this recipe.”