I used to be vegetarian a long time ago, lasted about a week (that was also when I gave up coffee, alcohol and sweets and after a few days decided life wasn’t worth living) – frailty, thy name is Fiend.
So I’m not one but I’ve fed a few and it’s really easy to adapt a lot of recipes to make them suitable. Admittedly, steak excluded. But I do often wonder whether vegetarians who enjoy food and cooking and God knows most of them do as it’s not about deprivation but lifestyle, look up all sorts of recipes, not necessarily labelled ‘veggie’ and decide ‘that looks good, I’ll just swap the beef/bacon/fish for more veg or potatoes or rice’. I hope that is the case and so I’m tagging this recipe as veggie as well. Here's my note to vegetarians then: this will work perfectly fine for you, just ignore the bacon and all the references thereof.
Pasta dish then. I love pasta. I could eat pasta every day, if it only didn’t contain carbs. Since it does (hell, what other reason it tastes so good?), it’s an occasional treat. Not so in the olden days when I was a student, skinny and skint, I’d often throw some cooked plain pasta into a pan with butter, fry it up till crispy underneath and stick whatever cheese I had (could afford) on it. Disgustingly yummy.
But now for a bit more sophisticated treat: this is one of the best pasta dishes, fennel gets on with gorgonzola like a house on fire and bacon (did I just say bacon? naah) adds a bit of saltiness.