Harvest Salad and Beef Mushroom Montage

This meal was a two part ordeal. Part one…failure; part two…only partially successful. So Jeff and I try to make these two dishes. I work on the Beef Mushroom Montage (Gretchen) which is a creative name for Mushroom/Beef Stroganoff and Jeff was in charge of emptying the dish washer and toasting the pecans for the Harvest Salad (Amanda). Jeff was a little late getting the pecans out of the oven, but I don’t think it would have mattered anyway. The directions were either off or our stove is entirely too hot! So in conclusion, the pecans were a charred black that gave a charred ‘character’ to my cookie sheet that will never come off. Those were the last of the pecans so we scratched this recipe for tonight and just had a normal salad.
The Montage was supposed to simmer for 30 minutes to thicken. I gave it 30, I gave it 45, I gave it an hour, I turned the heat down, I turned the heat off, I left the cover on, I took the cover off, I even added copious amounts of corn starch…slosh, slosh; why won’t this dang dish thicken? I realized that maybe the problem was the type of Cream of Mushroom Soup we bought. I had gone to Whole Foods today and got a natural organic yadda yadda soup. I think this recipe calls for more of a Kroger type of soup…full of who knows what but it will thicken!
So we gave up on waiting and poured the still soup (not sauce) over some noodles that I had horribly overcooked while waiting for the dang soup to become a sauce! So I took no pictures and decided to try another day. The leftovers would surely thicken in the fridge and I could cook up new noodles .On this day, the pecans were not burnt, the noodles were great…but the stupid sauce was still not thick! What could I do!? I dumped it on the noodles and finessed the noodles a bit until it looked like something reasonable to take a picture of.
On a positive note I made some toasted French bread with Spanish olive oil, fresh basil from my dying garden, tomatoes and mozzarella cheese. What a glutinous meal this has become, but the taste was worth the tummy ache.