Presenting: mayo pasta. A limited-pantry improvisation I like so much, I'll put it in regular rotation. How did it come about? 
Today is #carbonaraday, I'm told. You don't have to twist my arm to make it. However, we're out of the crucial ingredient: eggs. And it's not like we can just go shoping(sp?) for more. Then I remembered: mentaiko pasta……
Mentaiko spaghetti is a Japanese dish where the sauce is mentaiko (marinated pollock roe) with tons of mayo. Delicious kewpie mayo, specifically. It's SO good, omg. (thanks, @jessiechar!) So why not apply this idea to carbonara?
I've got butter (keeps frozen forever), I've got pasta and mayo (keeps… forever). So here we go. Butter, parmesan, black pepper, mayo. Luckily, I have some Russian quail-egg mayo. Good stuff!
[Permit me a grumpy sidebar: America, the land of mayo, has the dullest mayo! Best Foods/Hellmann's is MEH; it's just like, gelatinous flavorless fat. Every other country's mayo I've had has been so much better! Swiss Thomy. Japanese kewpie, of course. Russian, Vietnamese…]
Ok, back to the upsetting mayo carbonara. What happens to mayo when you heat it, doesn't it split weirdly? No! It just melts smoothly. You can use mayo as a cooking fat, a marinade, a pizza sauce. Hey I'm also out of guanciale or such. But I have Russian smoked Salo from @kachka!
*starts stirring cooked spaghetti in a big bowl with the sauce and extra pasta water* Omg this looks so good you guys. It's saucing so nicely. Do I do parsley to finish? Heck yes, it looks nice. Here we go:
*steps around the lectern, walks among the students* I guess my larger point is, improvising because you're out of an ingredient shouldn't feel like punishment. It's an opportunity to discover something new! Every cool dish has an origin story where the cook was out of something.
As a wise man once said,
