In the Crockpot Tonight: Beef Stroganoff

It's the Man's birthday today. But considering that he was a pain in the tuchus on MY special day last week, I'm not feeling TOO guilty that today I'm at work and he's got the girls!

He IS getting a nice dinner though. It's a cold, windy day and we're having Beef Stroganoff for dinner.

There are lots of recipes for Stroganoff, but they all usually mean beef cooked with onions and mushrooms with a creamy sauce, and served with noodles.

Alton Brown has a great recipe for it in I'm Just Here For the Food , but it's a hands on recipe and today I'll get home at dinner time.

So last night I sliced the beef, tossed it with the flour mix and put it in the fridge in a plastic ziplock bag. I sliced the onions and stored them too. And this morning, I put the beef in the crock, put the onions on top, added pre-sliced mushrooms, poured the liquids on top and set it to slow cook.

Tonight all I'll have to do is add the yogurt to the sauce, cook the noodles and dinner is ready.

We're not going to have birthday cake. Instead, SC is going to try her hand at baking brownies from a mix. It's her first baking attempt, so I figured we'd do something easy. We don't need a whole cake anyway--there's just 4 of us. So we will have brownie sundaes as our special birthday treat!

Here's the Strogranoff recipe:

CROCKPOT BEEF STROGANOFF:

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 tsp dry mustard

1/8 tsp black pepper

2-3 lbs of beef  (I usually use chuck roast), cut in pieces about 3" long and 1/2" wide

2 onions, sliced

8 oz sliced mushrooms 

1 1/2 cups beef broth (I use Minor's concentrated base for mine)

1/4 cup white wine  (optional)

1 1/2 cups  plain yogurt  (or sour cream, if your diet allows it!) mixed with 14 cup flour

1 lb wide egg noodles or other such pasta--your choice

Combine 1/2 cup flour, mustard and pepper in a ziplock bag. Add beef and toss to coat.

Place beef in crock pot. Add onions and mushrooms. Pour broth and (if using) wine over everything.

Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hours.

At Dinner Time:  Cook noodles according to package directions.

Stir yogurt/flour mixture into the stroganoff and serve over the noodles.

NOTE: We like a thicker sauce, so we remove meat, mushrooms and onions from the crock and stir the yogurt into the liquids.  Then we cook it in the microwave for several minutes. At this point, you can either return the solids to the crock, or just ladle the sauce over each plate to taste.

ANOTHER NOTE: Since it's the Man's birthday, I'll admit--this is good on rice too. But I still prefer mine with noodles...............

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