Birthday Dinner

Slow Cooker Beef Stroganoff

 

I got a text yesterday wishing me happy birthday that continued, "I hope you aren't cooking your own birthday dinner!" Well, it turns out that I did cook supper last night. We can have a "birthday dinner" some other time. Yesterday afternoon was busy so I planned a slow cooker meal and tried a new recipe. This one is good enough to share. The recipe is at the bottom.

What I did give myself as a birthday treat was extra time at the piano. I started piano lessons at age 6. And for well over 50 years everything I played was some kind of music written down in a book or on a piece of sheet music. I have stacks and stacks of music and shelves full of books. 

A curiousity you would see on my music shelves was the collection of fake books that I could not play from. If you are not a musician, that just means you only get a melody line and the chord names written in the appropriate place. (These are called lead sheets.) Not a complete written out song. Most fake books have hundreds of songs. I clearly remember buying my first fake book in 1974. The cover has fallen off but I still have it. Over the years I kept adding another fake book to my collection even though I didn't know what to do with them. It's a mystery why I even bought the first one, much less several more.

But it must have been a deeply buried desire to one day be able to sit down and play freely. No need to focus my eyes on tiny little black dots printed on the page. As I have aged, that is becoming hard to do. Buying those books was like planting seeds. Seeds that finally started to grow about two years ago when I started learning new music skills*. Learning chords—even the crazy sounding jazz chords with long symbols. (Easier to play than to read.) And most importantly learning that a lead sheet is a suggestion of a song. I can play it anyway I want to. Change the rhythm, change the chords, even tinker with the melody.

This has become my brain work. I have friends who love jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, Sudoku, cryptograms...all ways to keep our brains working. What I am doing is the same thing in musical form.

I only play for myself, in my own home. There is no goal to play "out" somewhere. It's just for fun. But oh, what fun I'm having! Here is a song I recorded yesterday. I remember hearing it when I was growing up. Some of you might remember this tune, too.

I gave myself quite a gift. The gift of not thinking I was too old to learn something completely new. Yes, this way of playing is THAT much different from reading music. So maybe it's time for you to try something you've always wanted to do. Instead of saying "I'm too old" say "better late than never!"

Now on to what was cooking in the slow cooker while I spent most of the morning at the piano. Beef Stroganoff is a perfect slow cooker recipe. The meat was so tender when it was done. It's close to how I usually cook stew meat (cubes of beef you can buy already cut up at the grocery store.). This recipe has more seasoning which upped the flavor. And the sour cream added richness.

Because we are a household of two, before I added the sour cream, I put half the cooked meat into a freezer container to save for later. You really cannot freeze it successfully after the sour cream is added. The sour cream will separate or curdle when it's thawed and reheated. When we are ready to have it another night, I will thaw, heat and then add the sour cream. Or, it would also be fine with NO sour cream.  You just can't say you're having "stroganoff" for dinner that night. It's the sour cream gravy that makes it stroganoff.

SLOW COOKER BEEF STROGANOFF

1 (10-1/2 oz.) can condensed cream of mushroom soup

3 cloves garlic

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1 envelope dry onion soup mix

8-oz. sliced mushrooms (I used baby Bellas)

1 medium yellow onion, diced

2-1/2 lbs. beef stew meat, cubed (I buy this already cut into cubes)

1 cup sour cream

16-oz. egg noodles

In your slow cooker, mix cream of mushroom soup, garlic, Worcestershire sauce and dry onion soup mix until blended. Add diced onions and mushrooms and stir. Add stew meat and mix until coated in the soup mixture.

Cook on LOW for 6-8 hours. (I cooked mine for 9 hours because of my schedule.)

When it's done, skim off any excess fat, then mix in sour cream.  

Serve over cooked egg noodles.

You can't get much easier than this. I will say that when I first took the lid off the slow cooker and added the sour cream, I thought the gravy was too thin. But I let it sit that way while I cooked the noodles. From the time I started heating the water to boil the noodles until they were done and drained was about 20 minutes. And by then, the gravy looked much more like "gravy." 

If you read the blog you saw that I saved half the recipe for the freezer BEFORE I added the sour cream. And we still have enough left for supper tonight. I don't mind leftovers for one night. More than that is too much!

This recipe came from Easy Family Recipes. You can find her excellent website online or follow her on Instagram, like I do. The recipes are just like she says—easy. 

*I joined this online piano lesson site 3-1/2 years ago. It has been more than I hoped for.