This pasta has a lot of flavors going on but it is definitely worth it.  One of my favorite dishes to make and eat 🙂

What You Will Need:
1 lb or Tortellini Pasta
6 or 7 Slices of Bacon, Chopped (any regular bacon you use, I personally like the center cut kind)
1 Small Sweet Onion, Chopped (the ones with the golden skin)
1/2 Stick of Butter
1/2 Cup of Milk
1 1/2 Tbsp of Flour
1 Tbsp of Parmesan Cheese
2 Tbsp of Dried Basil (dried herbs are my new favorite thing to have on hand)
4 Cloves of Garlic
3 tbsp Olive Oil
Salt and Pepper

First your going to chop up the bacon and start cooking it in a large sauce pan-not a skillet.  I didn’t even separate them when I took them out of the package I just left them stacked, as they were in the package, and just chopped the whole piece up into bits.  While that is cooking your going to make your pesto sauce.  At this point I would also start the pasta cooking process to get a pot of water on the stove to bring to a boil.

You can totally go out and buy pre-made pesto sauce to save time-this recipe yields about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of sauce.  Its just so easy I always just do it myself.  You take the Basil, Garlic, Olive Oil, and a dash of salt and pepper, toss it into a food processor and pulse until mixed and it looks saucy 🙂 give it a taste after and see if you need more salt and pepper, but that’s it! Now back to the bacon.

After the bacon bits are browned and cooked remove them from the pan and place them on a plate lined with paper towel, I used a paper plate to save some dishes.  Also your going to want to remove the bacon grease as well, since its super hot I just poured it into a bowl and set it aside until it cooled.  Put the pan back on low-med heat.  Hopefully your pasta water is boiling right now so go ahead and start cooking the tortellini according to the package instructions.

Melt the butter in the pan and add the onion, cook for about 5 minutes until the onion has softened, then add the tbsp of flour, while stirring and make sure you stir all the lumps out. Then SLOWLY add in the milk and stir then the other 1/2 tbsp, your going to notice the sauce getting thick.  Then add the parmesan cheese and again stir until incorporated, the sauce it going to be thick, like the below, and that’s OK.

lower the heat a bit then add the pesto sauce and the bacon and mix it all up and let it simmer so all the flavors can mix with each other.

By now your tortellini should be cooked so add them to the pan as well and mix-continue to let it cook for another 10 minutes stirring it all up so everything can absorb all the flavors.

Side Bar: The bacon grease should have solidified enough in that bowl you put it in making it easy to just scoop it out and toss it right in that garbage 🙂

That’s it!
serve and enjoy! xoxoxo