I just woke up one morning and decided my old blog didn't fit anymore.



Sun Fuzzies are Delicious is what my daughter says everytime dust flies up in the air. It's a positive way of looking at an annoying problem.



Plus, it's kind of silly. And that seems to fit me better.





Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Lisa's Beef Stroganoff

I made this last night after searching for the perfect Beef Stroganoff recipe.

I can't believe how many Beef Stroganoff recipes there are out there.

None of them really jumped out at me and said, "That's it! That's the Beef Stroganoff I've been looking for!" So I found one or two recipes that were sort of what I wanted and then I tweaked them (such as browning the meat first, adding soy sauce, etc...) to make my own recipe.

Every once in awhile, you just need to make a dish where you don't worry about calories (one serving will be around 480 calories). I had to do some extra walking to justify eating this, but I think it was worth it.

Feel free to tweak it as you want. That's up to you.


Ingredients:

1 pound (actually, I would use about a pound and a half next time around) top sirloin,
cut into strips

1 sweet onion, chopped

4 garlic cloves, diced fine

1 pkg. sliced bella mushrooms

2 cups (almost one can) of beef broth

3/4 cup red wine

1/4 cup soy sauce (low sodium)

About 2 or 3 dashes of Worcestershire sauce

4 Tbs. flour

Olive oil (a drizzle here and there)

3 Tbs. butter (it doesn't hurt to use a little more, but don't over do it)

1 tub sour cream

1 pkg. Egg Noodles

Spices : (add to taste) salt, pepper, cayenne, paprika (some recipes call for thyme or dill, but I didn't use those). You can also throw in a dash of cumin for a kick.


For this recipe, I used a Dutch Oven on my stove. You don't have to use one of those, if you don't have it, but you will need a fairly large pot with a good sized bottom.

Don't forget to make your noodles to pour the sauce over!
First: Brown top sirloin in a little (tiny bit) olive oil and set aside on a plate
Next: Throw in onions and mushrooms. You may need to add a little more olive oil to pan, but be careful. When they are a little soft (they will soften as you are making sauce, so you don't have to wait for them to turn transparent necessarily), add in the garlic and stir around until fragrant. Quickly add butter and flour and stir around with the onions and mushrooms and garlic for a good minute or two. Make sure to scrape up those brown bits at the bottom of the pan.
Then: SLOWLY add your liquids (broth, wine, soy sauce, worcestershire sauce) and stir as you add. Keep stirring. Stir frequently. Add in your spices to taste. Let sauce turn a delicious darkish brown color and bubble just a bit on the sides. If it boils, your heat is way too high. Taste and spice more if needed.
When sauce thickens, add in browned steak, and stir and simmer some more (about 3 minutes or so)
Last: add in as much sour cream as you want (I used about 3/4 of a tub) and serve over Egg Noodles.

Rumor has it that Beef Stroganoff should have a little tartness to it. Mine did. I don't know how I did that, since I didn't add any lemon, but it had just enough bite to not distract from the savory. Since I'm all about savory flavors, I did not want to have too much tartness in, which is why I omitted lemon juice from my recipe. But if you like tart, by all means, squeeze in some lemon juice.

I served this with a side of petite peas and a nice Bonterra Cabernet (Trader Joe's-$11.00)


Enjoy!

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

A Different Balloon Animal

When I was about seven or eight years old, my mother and I lived in this little condo in Ontario.

This was before all the strip malls and such were built up on Foothill Blvd.

This was when there were vineyards all over Ontario and Rancho Cucamonga. In fact, there was a Vineyard right across the street from our condo complex. A neighborhood friend, Tootsie, and I would cross the street (something that was allowed back then) and steal grapes and eat them right off the vine. It was awesome.

I have fond memories of this condo. My Grandpa taught me how to ride a bike in the alley behind the condo. I had Holly Hobby themed wallpaper on my bedroom walls. I ate grilled cheese sandwiches like they were going out of style. And my mom would throw me birthday parties on the little patio that separated our condo from our garage.


One early, sleepy, school day morning (not long after one of my patio birthday parties), my Mom slid open the sliding glass door and stepped out from the kitchen onto the patio to either go start the car in the garage or to go get something out of the garage. It was dark and she was barefoot.

One step out the door and my Mother stepped on something slimy and freaked out. It was not uncommon for the snails to start their daily cruise from one end of the patio to the other at this time in the morning. Stepping out from the kitchen in order to get to the garage, one would be likely to hear the crunch of a snail shell under one's tennis shoes if one wasn't watching where one was stepping.

Having no love for snails (or slugs), Mom reached in to the kitchen, grabbed the salt off the nearby counter and proceeded to sprinkle the heck out of the poor, slimy creature. Then she scrubbed the bottom of her foot. If you don't know what salt does to snails, try it sometime.

We managed to get to school and work with no other snail (or slug) incidences.

Upon our arrival home, stepping from the garage on to the patio and heading toward the kitchen door, my mother happened to notice that not everything was cleaned up from my birthday party.

In front of the kitchen door was a deflated, dead balloon. Completely covered in salt.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Frig-a-phobia

My husband is scared of our freezer. Ask him. He'll tell you. He is scared of the freezer for the same reason that he should be scared of the refrigerator and the cupboards and the linen closet.

But for some reason he focuses all his fear on the freezer.

You see, when opening the door to the freezer, or closet, or cupboards around here, you're likely to get hurt. Things jump out of enclosed spaces. I'd like to think it's from being in this house and hanging around this family too long. We all get cabin fever easily and feel the need to escape enclosed spaces. The more likely scenario is that I am one of those people that just shoves stuff willy-nilly into freezers and fridges and closets. There is no rhyme or reason to how any of my shelves are arranged. I don't have time to think about it, I just have time to hide it behind a closed door.

So I can understand why my husband avoids the freezer and asks me to open it for him all the time. The Freezer can inflict pain. One time a whole bag of ice fell on my foot. Another time a bunch of Weight Watcher Breakfast Quesadillas punched me in the face. I guess they were tired of being taunted by the French Vanilla Ice Cream.


I googled "fear of freezers" to see if there is a name for that. The closest I came was "Frig-a-phobia" which is a fear of refrigerators.

I fear the refrigerator, but for a completely different reason. I'm not sure how long the stuff that jumps out at you has been in there sometimes. Does it jump out because it wants to be eaten? Because it has no room? Or because the other foods in there are tired of it sitting around wasting space? I just don't know. And I have a fear of the unknown.

Which I know there's a name out there for that too.