Ground Beef Stroganoff

Part of the search for making more food at home for Tony and I was also searching for foods that would be easy to make after a long day at work. As I've mentioned before, I work ten hour days now.  Interacting with people--sometimes very unhappy people--all day can be really taxing. Sometimes after a particularly long day, I just want to come home and drop.

It's because of that need to have things fast and still tasty that we've been perusing busy-family type recipes. Easy mom foods that can be put on the table relatively simply for the days when I don't feel like slow cooking a whole roast all day and eating it for a week just because I didn't feel like making dinner after work. Soccer mom food. It's not what I love because these foods, I find, can rely a little heavily on canned soups and other such crap. However, in a pinch, it puts a cheap and easy meal on the table and saves us from fast food hell.

We found a recipe for ground beef stroganoff on Pinterest (it's always from Pinterest, isn't it?) that pretty much embodied what we were looking for in an evening meal. It was simple and fast to make. The ingredients were more or less on-hand already. It was filling and delicious. When we made this recipe, it fed four of us, since we included our friends Melody and Stacie in the meal. We also had left-overs that I took to work later in the week.

We served this over egg noodles, which was a great way to go. I wish that we had incorporated more of a vegetable with this meal because it can be a little bit heavy without something to kind of offset the creaminess of the stroganoff. That said, there was nothing about the recipe itself that I would have modified.

Also, let's just take a moment to talk about kitchen failures. I've been playing around with breads, as I've mentioned in past posts. I decided for the stroganoff to try to make some quick biscuits using the recipe that I found in the cook book that came with my KitchenAid. They were disaster. They were hockey pucks. When they were warm, they still tasted good; when they cooled, they were hard and terrible. They were more trash than contribution to dinner, so the trash is where they ended up.

Even despite my biscuit failure, I'll try again to make biscuits. I think it'll be easier for me when I have a food processor. Right now, I have to make them with either the mixer or by hand, and I feel like biscuits are generally more successful with a food processor--at least, that's what all the recipes and the YouTube videos seem to say. The food processor will probably be my next kitchen purchase, but I'm not sure when that will be. Right now, I'll just do what I can with what I have and try not to get discouraged if it doesn't always go the way I plan. That's the best I can do!