I had forgotten all about this. I’ll have to look and see how far we made it until we tired of beef stroganoff. I’ll report back. Stay tuned. (Link to the recipe is at the end.)
The other day, Mr. Big Food announced that Beef Stroganoff was far & away the dish for which he had the most recipes. Over 50.
As you will recall, Mr. Big Food has been culling recipes from spiral bound recipe books, and some classic American cookbooks, for more than 15 years. (FYI– Craig Claibourne, food editor of the NYT, was a Mississippian.) Over 33,000 individual Word docs of recipes, tips, how-tos, etc. comprise his Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide. (It’s an indexer’s nightmare.)
Real American home cooking is a food heritage that needs and deserves to be preserved. It is one of the few remaining aspects of American life and culture that needs and deserves preserving.
The Big Food Manual and Survivalist Flourishing Guide
Upon this announcement, Mr. Big Food suggested that we should cook & eat beef stroganoff once a week, beginning with the first recipe he entered into The Big Food Manual and carrying on– as far as we are able, we’re talking about a year’s worth of weekly Beef Stroganoffs– through to the latest. Like a Soup Contest with no end.
Unlike our Soup Contests, and because we are now just the two of us, there will be no scoring. But we will take notes.
NOTES: Jiffy Beef Stroganoff was good. I anticipate that it will fall to the wayside as other, more authentic recipes are tried. It’s “jiffy” because it’s a stovetop recipe that doesn’t require one to boil the noodles separately. But it’s tasty and filling. If you are at a point in your life where you’d like to make a good hardy jiffy homemade meal, this is for you.
For us, since we do not buy ground beef and instead grind our own, there were no time-saving features. But again, if you are at a point in your life where you buy ground beef — and there’s nothing wrong with that– and want to learn how to cook at home, this is a very good beef stroganoff.
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