Food! Classic Beef Stronganoff, only simpler!

Last night I prepared a dinner based on a recipe in  The $7 a Meal Healthy Cookbook: 301 Nutritious, Delicious Recipes That the Whole Family Will Love (pg 179)

Olive Oil    ---I used Olive Oil Spray from Trader Joe's. Did the trick.
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 pound ground beef  -- The Guy bought ground buffalo instead
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 lb uncooked egg noodles
2 cups nonfat sour cream -- this is the really important part of the dish, as it's what makes it Stroganoffy!

Cook the 1 lb bag of egg noodles until they're finished in the boiling water.  Start slightly after you start the veggies. Drain, set aside.

Heat olive oil in a pan large enough to contain all ingrediants.
Add the garlic and onion first. (I added in the chopped celery at the same time; it didn't seem to hurt the recipe)
Add in the beef and the celery. Cook until the beef is done.
Add in the sour cream, mix, cover and remove from heat (so the sour cream won't do awful things like curdle)

Spoon the meat/sour cream mixture over the egg noodles, and serve!

This was a big hit with the family, with everyone either A) trying it to begin with (Tall Boy and Mermaid) or B) going back for seconds (me and the Guy). 

If you're a vegetarian, I think you could substitute a soy product, or heavy textured mushrooms instead, just make sure to chop the mushrooms up small enough so that it 'disappears' into the sour cream along with the other veggies.

Plain Greek yogurt might substitute well for the sour cream. You'll get a tarter taste that way, and you'd have to remove the pan from the heat *right away* so you don't mess up the yogurt and end up with a vegetable morass instead of Stroganoff.

This one is on my "must repeat" menu now. Maybe every two weeks or so.

Now, I realize the title of the cookbook includes "$7 Meal". That was certainly not how much it cost for our dinner. Buffalo is 1/3 more expensive than beef around here.  I think the 1 lb package is $7 or 8 dollars. Sour Cream in a larger tub is at least $4. Garlic is cheap (I used bottled minced I already had), and so is celery, which I already had. A 1 pound bag of egg noodles is roughly $2 or $3.  So, in all, this meal cost us about $15, give or take. But to me, that's still pretty good, considering that if we'd gone out to eat, that $15 would pay for one person! I could probably get better deals than the full price ingredients used here (ie, use cheaper ground beef), but I'm into using better quality stuff these days when I can.

Conned

I guess I'll have to admit I was snookered by a conwoman back in November. This girl in her twenties came to our door, selling magazine subscriptions for some reason or other. At this point, it hardly matters. And even though I had a niggle in the back of my head, especially when she tacked on an extra $15 to the amount, I should have said NO. But I didn't, and now I'm out 60some dollars. Every once in a while, Mermaid asks me when she's going to get her magazine, and when I still had the reciept, I called it last month, the woman I spoke to on the phone said the mag wasn't started up yet.

Yeah. Right.

It's been four months. The magazine. It ain't coming.

I'm perplexed with myself. I don't usually get sucked into scams like this. And it WAS a scam. You'd think I would have listened to the inner niggle telling me it wasn't a good idea.

*figuratively kicks conwoman in the ass*

Update: upon clearing my desk up of mess, I found the receipt. It's 6pm here in LA, and it's a Sunday. I'm going to call them up tomorrow morning. Any idea what I should say in order to get some results?  It would appear that the first time I called, I was told to call back in APRIL. I paid them on November 11 2009 of last year!

Dynasty Technology, Inc.
PO Box 1060
Kitteridge, CO 80457
(303) 674-8252

"Allow 150 days for delivery of your subscription"

Buh? Doing the math, that comes out to exactly 5 months (of 30 days each).  I wonder if the long lead-time is so that people who give them money forget about it, or lose the receipt and the phone number!

Wedding Fest on Lifetime?

Yesterday was Weddingfest time on a cable channel, most likely on Lifetime. I can't be sure now, because none of the cable channel websites allows me to go back a day in their schedule and check!

But it was movie after movie of wedding vows, wedding hijinks, wedding romances (all messed up, of course!) wedding wedding wedding!

Mermaid, 13 years old, switched the TV onto a movie that had Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina, The Teenage Witch - The Complete First Season) in it: My Fake Fiance
 She missed the first hour of it, but it didn't make any difference. Two people both oweing money to a mobster, pretend to go through with a wedding, somehow getting the mobster off his back.

There are some badly written and connected scenes that show the doofus male (he's always a doofus) with awesome musculature going to see his estranged father who has now won money at the track and wants to make it up to his son by giving him some of the money as a peace offering. This is done because ... well, let's just say it was because of an out-of-the-blue line spoken by a child saying that his grandparents are spending his college money on his aunt's wedding. So the fake fiance feels guilty and goes to his father.

Of course, this was only one movie of many in this movie marathon. It's enough to make you think that most women are only thinking of the wedding, and the romance, and want nothing else! The worst of it is, these are pretty bad movies, the whole lot of them.