Ingredients

For 1 serving:

• 60g smoked lardons
• 1 clove of garlic (germ removed, sliced thin)
• A dozen green peppercorns (crushed in mortar and pestle, you can use black pepper if that's what you have)
• 80g dry pasta, preferrably the shorter/smaller kind (radiatori is my favorite)
• 1 teaspoon dashi granules (preferrably the fish based kind)
• 1 whole egg and 1 egg yolk
• 1 tablespoon worth of parmesan (use freshly coarsly grated)
• furikake (your preferred kind, my recommandation would be the nori tamago variant)
• Shichimi togarashi

Instructions

1. Start by stir frying the lardons on medium heat to render out the fat, you can add a teaspoon of olive oil to help the process if it's too dry.
2. Once most of the fat is rendered out, add the garlic and crushed peppercorns. Cook until fragrant. Add the dry pasta and lightly toast. Then add just enough boiling water to cover the pasta and the dashi granules. Cook risotto style on medium-low. Add more boiling water if necessary.
3. In the meantime, add the eggs and parmesan to a tall container and blitz with an immersion blender. Add a teaspoon of water to loosen up slightly.
4. Once the pasta is mostly cooked (very al dente) cut the heat and wait a couple of minutes, then add the egg/cheese mixture and vigorously stir. Turn the heat back on to low and gradually increase it to reach medium-low, while stirring continuously to form the creamy sauce. This may take longer than you expect, but if you know how to make this dish you can get the right consistancy in 5 minutes instead of 15 minutes. However I urge you to take your time as the sauce can become less creamy if the heat is set too high too fast.
5. Serve in a bowl, top with the furikake and a line across the bowl of shichimi togarashi.

Bonus notes

I've developped this dish as treat to give myself when I had little time to cook but wanted to eat something naughty. It's a play on the traditionnal carbonara with some additionnal ingredients and slightly different technique, some loosely inspired by Japanese cuisine. I've found that the dashi and furikake adds a nice layer of fish flavor, creating a sort of surf'n'turf variant of the classical version of the dish.

Using green peppercorns instead of black pepper makes the dish less intense, as the floral aromas of the green type round things off a bit.

The technique of cooking the pasta in little water, in the same fashion as a risotto, allows to retain a lot more starch which help the sauce become very creamy despite not having a ton of added fat or cheese. It also stays creamy a bit longer and saves the trouble of cleaning another pot just to cook pasta. I advise to bye good quality pasta (look for a pale color and rough surface) as lower quality pasta doesn't release nearly as much starch.
The shichimi togarashi is optional but for platting's sake makes a nice contrast and "breaks" the round geometry of the bowl.

This recipe scales pretty well up to 3-4 servings, you can easily make that for two on a date night. The portion size should be enough, it's purposefully not huge to give space for a refreshing salad or a cute dessert!
You can replace the smoked lardons with mushrooms and smoked paprika (liquid smoke would work really well too), but I can't vouch for it as I haven't tried it yet.