Cooking through the Family and Friends Recipe book with my trusty companion, fermented grapes.
Showing posts with label stroganoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stroganoff. Show all posts
Thursday, June 10, 2010
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.
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.
Labels:
beef,
harvest salad,
mushrooms,
pecans,
sauce,
stroganoff
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