What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?

I do most of the cooking in our household, and I usually do a pretty decent job. This was not the weekend for good cooking though.

On Sunday after doing groceries, I'll often put together some of the stuff from the previous week into a stew or a chilli. Got a bunch of tomatoes still? Make a chilli! Carrots and celery? Make a soup! Well, I had a bunch of tomatoes, and a bit of ground beef and sausage, and a few other veggies, so I made a chilli. It smelled pretty great, and I was pretty excited for dinner as I had been doing physical activity all day. We sat down to dinner, everyone had a few bites and we looked at each other and put our spoons down.

And that's when I realized that we keep the nutmeg and chilli powder right next to each other and I had made a horrible mistake.

Have you guys tried a ‘Cosmic Crisp’ apple yet?

I started seeing them in grocery stores here last year and I've been buying them for the last few months here. They’re really good, very crisp and extremely juicy. They also seem to last longer than most apples in my fridge, so I haven’t been buying anything else since.

I'm about to make my second recent batch of quick stroganoff. If you're a stroganoff purist, call this something else - it's delicious and easy but bears passing resemblance to authentic stuff.

That said, the recipe as I have tweaked it over my lifetime:

• 1 lb lean ground beef
• 2 lbs mushrooms, washed and sliced
• 1 T beef soup base
• 1 t MSG
• 2 T butter
• Can of cream of mushroom soup
• 1 C sour cream
• 1 lb pasta - medium egg noodles or farafelle or radiatorre or whatever you like
• Optional: Large yellow onion or two, slivered

Directions:

• Start water boiling for pasta. Cook according to package directions. I recommend al dente, but you do you.
• Brown the beef in a skillet. Note that as lean ground beef cooks, water will release. As that happens, add the beef soup base and mix in well. Continue to cook until the water is cooked out and evaporated. Set aside.
• Optional: Saute slivered onions in additional butter until translucent. And/or see note at bottom if you, like me, don't like sauteed onion.
• Add butter to the skillet and cook the mushrooms on high heat. Cook until the water has all come out and evaporated. Remove from heat, stir in cream of mushroom soup and beef.

So you will have three things: Meat/mushroom mixture, sour cream, pasta. To serve, put pasta in bowl, put on a scoop of mixture, then sour cream. Stir when serving.

Putting up the mixture separately from the pasta means the pasta won't absorb all the liquid and dry it out when you go to reheat. Also, add sour cream after reheating - so you don't have to nuke the sour cream.

A NOTE ABOUT ONIONS: I can't eat onions unless they are so mushy that the disappear into the dish. They still bring huge flavour, and this is a dish that benefits from them. So here's how I do onions for a dish like this:

1. Sautee the onion in butter until it's translucent
2. Add a half cup or so of water - or whatever to make the onion not soup, but have a bit of visible moisture
3. Turn the heat down to low and simmer the water back out of the onion

This results in very tender onion that no longer has a texture I can't eat without triggering my gag reflex, as well as firmly getting rid of the raw onion flavour.

You can often add chopped garlic near the end of the saute portion, then you have tasty garlic and onion to add to your dish.

I also typically start my water for pasta boiling when I go to simmer out the water from the onion - as a matter of timing. But as I don't think most would do that, I wrote the instructions for "normal" people. But also, considering that all of this can sit just fine after cooking until it's time to eat, timing is not critical.