What’s for dinner? It’s decided a lot differently now than when I was a kid. When I was growing up in Baldwinville in the 1970s, I don’t remember any input from kids as far as what we had for dinner. Look at your own life now, and see how different that is. My father had some favorites, as I remember it, and none of them were any good in my opinion. The worst was steamed kielbasa and potatoes, then some frozen Salisbury steak patties, hotdogs, which I didn’t mind at the time, but now call them snout sandwiches, and the worst – – beef stroganoff.
Here are my memories about childhood beef stroganoff from the 70s. I acknowledge that memories work in weird ways – – so I could be completely misinterpreting this, but they are my memories of it, so they are true as my memories. This 1970s version of beef stroganoff was scrambled burger, sour cream, a can of cream of mushroom soup, Worcestershire sauce, and egg noodles. I even think there was a version of it at my house that substituted the burger for tuna, which doubled down on the awful. I’m sure I must have a few ‘good food’ memories from my childhood, I’ll have to think about it.
As an adult looking back, my memories of childhood beef stroganoff was just me pushing it around, trying to scrape cream off of the noodles so I could eat just the noodles, and trying to make it looked like I ate some of my dinner. Recently, our only restaurant in town, The Barn, offered a beef stroganoff dish. When I made the face you’d expect given my history with this dish, our server Alexa told us it was extremely popular and that ‘people love it’.
I decided to give it a try. It turns out if you use good quality ingredients, the result is actually delicious. It’s not the prettiest dish, but it was so amazing, I might have leftovers for breakfast only because I know someone else will eat it by lunchtime. Nothing against my mother and her cooking in the 1970s, but in our neighborhood, the moms didn’t make fresh pasta, and who knows where the meat came from.
As a very good cook, but not much of a baker (requires too much accuracy), I tend to decide what I want, and then look at a few recipes to get the basics, and run with it from there. My beef stroganoff recipe started with some Lilac Hedge Farm steak tips straight from the freezer. I don’t know if that’s the recommended way to marinate something, but it worked. I splashed in a bit of Worcestershire sauce – – which is not my favorite, but a staple of this recipe, and soy sauce. I let it marinate in the fridge all day and when I got home, I put it in a roasting crock and stuck it in the oven for a couple hours at 325°.
You might remember that I took a pasta making class back in November, and I wrote a story about that. When you’re making homemade pasta, you choose the width and you also choose the thickness. Manual pasta makers and KitchenAid attachments alike have consistent thicknesses for pasta rolling. It is the thickest and I don’t think you could actually eat that if you boiled it, I usually flatten it down to a thickness of 3. In this case, I wanted the pasta to have a little more tooth to it, if that makes sense, so I rolled it to fettuccine width at a thickness of 4. That means that when I boiled it to include in the recipe, the resulting pasta, as you can see in the photo, was pretty thick.
Pasta making isn’t incredibly quick, it’s pretty floury and when it comes to rolling and kneading, it’s all by hand, so it can get a little tedious. But I’m also extremely impatient so if you can do one thing for 15 minutes, you should be fine.
I used my red spiral bound Betty Crocker cookbook as my go to recipe source well in to my 40’s, even having worked for a cookbook publisher. Betty Crocker was my go to. Now, as to be expected, what I have left for cookbooks sit in the pantry while the internet is my source for recipes these days. Allrecipes.com is my favorite. They have several recipes for every inspiration you have. I found a beef stroganoff recipe that had a lot of solid reviews.
I usually sort of glance at recipes to get the general idea of the ingredient list. I definitely don’t always adhere to the recommended steps. In this case, it didn’t matter. I used avocado oil, because it was in front of me, but I usually use olive oil oil. I sliced up some onions really thin and sautéed them while I was slicing mushrooms and kept sautéing, then I added butter and some broth. I only had chicken broth, and it was beef stroganoff. We all survived. I added some Wondra gravy flour for thickening and let that get to a boil to activate the gravy flour, and then left it on low while I worked on other parts of the recipe.
Most recipes I saw called for white wine. Several months ago I decided to stop drinking wine. Maybe there will be a story about that in the future, but it just wasn’t serving me. This has significantly reduced how much we eat at restaurants, and I’m cooking some pretty delicious meals at home. I think I chose not to use it in this recipe because it seemed unnecessary, and I didn’t want to break my no-wine streak.
I stirred in a bunch of sour cream. I typically use nonfat plain Greek yogurt as sour cream, and I can’t even tell the difference. However, I wasn’t going to risk wasting my delicious Lilac Hedge steak tips on Greek yogurt having done something weird to the recipe. I turned off the heat, stirred in some more sour cream and added more chicken broth and let it sit.
I took the steak tips out of the oven and sliced them into slightly bigger than bite-size pieces, then mixed them into the ugly mess in the sour cream pan. I cooked the pasta as you would expect to cook pasta, and set aside. As I was straining it, I splashed a little pasta water into the sour cream/beef/onion/mushroom mixture–that’s a trick my daughter taught me – – because we’ve come a long way since kids didn’t have input in the kitchen.
I scooped the beef mixture on top of the plain noodles, then sprinkled some fresh parsley and fresh grated parmesan. There were only three of us at home last night. If you know me, we never eat on time because my recipes tend to get elaborate and delayed, but it was worth the wait as it may have been the most delicious meal I remember making in the last several years. So this story isn’t really a recipe, and it’s really not supposed to be life advice. Just an observation on my part, but keeping an open mind may end up with the results you didn’t expect.
