Further attempts at Food Porn (tm).

I've been jonesing to try this "Chicken Stroganoff" recipe I found in the latest "Cooking Light" ever since the magazine showed up in my mailbox last week. But various factors conspired against me, and I was unable to cook it until tonight.

First, a word about stroganoff: My mom is sort of a classic "mom" cook. She has some old standbys that are simple, but totally yummy. Her King Ranch Chicken Casserole (or as we always called it, "Mexican Chicken") is one of my all-time favorites. Her Thanksgiving dressing is unrivaled. Her chicken spaghetti rocks. But one of the mom things I gave up many, many moons ago was her Beef Stroganoff. When I stopped eating mammal in 1994, many of my favorite dishes could be recreated pretty damn accurately with meat substitutes or poultry substitutes. Not so, the magical stroganoff. Or so I thought until tonight.

I'm not going to go all into the recipe or anything, but I will tell you the ingredients that I think made this dish special: paprika, chopped onion, fresh sage, sherry, flat leaf parsley and love. That's right people: love.

I read the recipe beforehand in order to make my shopping list, but it also helped to look at the amount of time that the dish took to cook so I could plan my sides. I decided on acorn squash (microwaved) and asparagus (steamed). Also, I was able to tell the butcher at Whole Foods that I wanted a pound of boneless/skinless cut into 1/4" strips, which saved me that prep step.

Man was this good.

The only thing I did for the squash was pierce the "meat" with a fork 6 or so times and put a bit of butter in the hull along with some sea salt and fresh ground pepper before starting to cook. After about 8 minutes in the microwave, I pulled out the squash, and sprinkled a little grated asiago on top, and popped it back in the microwave for another 2 minutes or so. Perfection.

The only thing the fresh, spring asparagus needed was a little salt. SO good. I wish they were in-season year round.

Through just a little bit of planning, I managed to have everything finish cooking at about the same time and be ready for plating.

Hooray!!

The Geej even enjoyed this dinner. (I neglected to take a photo of the Geej's plated version of this meal...) Her liking this proves to me, I should really cook more things for her that don't come directly from the freezer. It's just so damn hard to do on weekday nights. But it's really fun and nice to do on weekends.

Oh, by the way, while I was prepping and cooking up a storm in the kitchen, here's what was going on in the dining room:

A rockin' tea party, featuring the hostess (Geej, of course) and 4 of her babies. Too funny.