Beef Stroganoff

For dinner tonight I made a quick and easy Beef Stroganoff by using home canned stew meat and homemade powdered mushrooms. It must have been good since they did not leave anything. :)

No one in my family likes mushrooms including me but I feel they do have some value in our nutrition so I set out to find a way that I could include them in to our menus. Last year I bought and Excalibur Food Dehydrator and starting dehydrating food for the first time. I love using the dried foods in my daily cooking. Then I heard about vegetable powders made from dehydrated foods so I decided to try making mushroom powder. After drying the mushrooms according to the directions I then ran them through a food processer. They didn't come out finely ground as I wanted so I decided to run them through my coffee grinder that I bought just for grinding herbs and spices. Worked great as you can see below.

To make the stroganoff I used two 12oz jars of stewmeat that I had canned last year, placed them in a pot, added two cups of beef broth and one tablespoon of the mushroom powder. Brought it to a good simmer then added three cups of egg noodles. Covered and cooked until the noodles were done. Added a little cornstarch slurry to thicken the broth and sourcream. And I was done. A main dish that would take me normally at least 30-40 minutes done in less than 20. I served it with corn on the cob and a tossed salad.

My own little hamburger helper type meal only better for us because I controlled the salt and it was healthier to because I used lean stew meat instead of fat laden ground beef. And it was cost effect to because I bought the roast on sale that I cut into stewmeat when I canned it. The roast was on sale for $2.29 a pound and ground beef at the time was $2.99 a pound.