Irv's Stroganoff

As long as I'm on a cooking roll, let me pass on this recipe from an old roommate, from whom I learned a fair amount of cooking. One of his more important rules, at least for the single guy trying to make an impression: "If you cook with booze, you can't lose".

No booze in this recipe, but its still a winner. For about six people. Leftovers taste good hot or cold. And re the booze; you can certainly serve it with lots of good red wine and a good time will be had by all.

1 big slab of round steak cut into cubes. This was the original recipe. You can't get those big slabs of round steak anymore, so I pick out a big London Broil and have the butcher cut it into bite sized chunks (about 1/2 in square cubes). They tend to make the chunks too big.
1 pint sour cream
8 ounces sliced mushrooms
1 can mushroom soup - the original full sodium variety.
one or two big onions, chopped
about 1/2 stick of butter
about 1/4 - 1/2 can of tomato paste
salt, thyme and oregano to taste.

saute mushrooms and onions in butter, and after about 15 minutes add steak cubes
and continue sauteing until steak is rare to medium rare
dump in soup, stir till warm, then dump in sour cream. Add tomato paste at the last moment, stir and season to taste. The tasting is quite important.

Oops, almost forgot to put in ©2009 backpack45.com to stop the blog bandits who take without attribution.

Maybe at some later date, I will share Louie's shredded potato fritters, though he didn't call them that. This was the first thing I ever learned to cook after I left home. I was on a fire crew one summer in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park, working at Cedar Grove. We had to feed ourselves. Louie was another member of the fire crew, and shared his cooking skills so I didn't starve. Another thing that kept us going was road kill. One day we heard a deer had been hit just down the road. We zipped down, butchered it, and for the rest of the summer, lived on it.