We had two nights in a row this week where I implemented the crockpot for our evening meal. Friday’s are one of those days that could go either way. The kids have dance classes right through the dinner hour, so one of two things needs to happen. Either I prepare dinner ahead of time so we can eat when we arrive back home, OR Andy needs to be home to prepare dinner. Usually when he is home, that means something gets slapped on the grill. This week he was busy though, so the crockpot came to the rescue.
Creamy Beef Over Noodles is another one from Stephanie O’Dea. (She’s going to start thinking that I’m stalking her, but I think she’ll be okay with that.) When I read the recipe through, I thought it sounded similar to a stroganoff type of dish. Andy loves stroganoff, and the kids tolerate it, so I thought it was worth a shot.
My problem came in when I actually went to buy the beef for the dish. We don’t buy much beef that isn’t ground, to be honest. It’s just become prohibitively expensive, and seldom seems to go on sale. Of course, this week it was not on sale anywhere. The recipe called for two pounds of stew beef, so I was looking for that at an affordable price, or two pounds of whole beef that I could cut up myself. I don’t know where all the beef was this week, but all I could find whole was T-bones and Sirloins- not stewing meat in the least. Finally, at the smaller grocery store, I found these smaller shoulder steaks that I thought would work. The only thing about them was that they had been “tenderized”, meaning they had been run through the machine that butchers use for cube steak. So the surface of these steaks was scored. I think this had a hand in the final texture we ended up with…
Stephanie’s recipe indicated that this should cook on low for 10-12 hours, but she had started with frozen beef, so I opted to give it 8 hours on low. Again, this was a simple, simple affair. Beef cubes, beef broth, milk, pepper, butter and herbes de provence went into the crockpot with a chopped onion. I used far less pepper than she had used as well- just several grinds from my grinder seemed plenty to me. Wow, this smelled incredible cooking! Even the kids were tantalized before we left for our dance classes.
While the meat cooked away, I also prepared my noodles ahead of time. This is one of my biggest time savers. When we have pasta, noodles or rice to go with our crockpot meal, I cook it ahead of time and then store it in the fridge in a microwaveable dish. This way I can walk in the door, put my dish in the microwave, and within five minutes our side dish is hot and ready to go. As it happened, Andy got home before we did, so he was able to heat the noodles up for us, as well as stir half a block of cream cheese into our beef.
Oh, this was good. This was very, very good. The beef was meltingly tender and flavorful- and the sauce was wonderful! By using the tenderized steak though, a lot of it had broken down in the crockpot as it cooked, so it almost looked like I had used ground beef with a few stew sized pieces added for good measure. While not the most attractive, it certainly was delicious and will definitely be repeated.
