Beef Stroganoff (Page 439)

• Date: Tuesday, February 6, 2007 -- 8:30pm
• Location: Somerville, MA
• Kitchen: Matty's Apartment
• Dining Companion: Matty
• Recipe Rating: A-

I made this beef stroganoff for dinner the first week of class because it just seemed like the right thing to start off the semester with. This dish was great! I am usually not so much a fan of beef stroganoff. I am not a huge mushroom person, and beef stroganoff is one of those dishes that has more bad renditions than good ones. This recipe was excellent though. I started with some really excellent beef tenderloin and the meat came out absolutely delicious and perfectly cooked. The sauce also had a nice flavor -- Matt pointed out that it would be better with less dill, and I agree, but it still had a wonderful taste to it. Overall, a very quick, delicious dish that I would definitely recommend for a cold winter evening.

Last night, after visiting Michael in the hospital, I stopped by my friend's place to hang out and eat pudding. I walked past his car on my way, noticing that it was still iced in to its parking spot on the street with two parking tickets on the hood. It's technically illegal to leave your car in the same spot for more than 48 hours in Somerville, but this is difficult to enforce. When you car is still snowed in days after it stops snowing though, it is easy for them to tell.

So at 10:30pm last night he and I took to the street with a pitchfork and a shovel and tried to free his car from the 8 or so inches of ice that the wheels were frozen in to, and the wall of ice and snow surrounding it. Two hours, a box of salt, and several buckets of warm water later, the car was free. It sounds miserable I suppose, but it was actually tremendous fun. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. And it was unbelievably satisfying to see that car finally come out. The endeavor had a few minor casualties: I stuck the pitchfork in a block of ice so hard that I actually broke the pitchfork in half when I leveraged my body weight against it. Whoops. I think the tread on his tires also suffered because the smell of burnt rubber was so pervasive that it took two showers to get it off me!

Sometimes there is such joy in the smallest things...