Strange Stroganoff…

Something funny happened last night at our house that I just have to tell you about!  I’ll preface the story by saying that my husband is a pretty good cook.  When our girls were little and I was working outside the home, he did all our cooking.  These days I do most of it, but he still cooks on the weekends.  I am a recipe-follower kind of cook and he is a make-it-up kind of cook.

I had planned Beef Stroganoff for dinner last night using my trusty recipe from the Better Homes and Garden cookbook.  My afternoon got busier than expected yesterday so he volunteered to cook dinner for me.  Fantastic!
When he called us all to dinner I noticed that the stroganoff gravy looked a little thinner than usual, but shrugged my shoulders and sat down.  As we were eating, I was trying to figure out what he did differently than I do.  The stroganoff tasted a bit funny – a little sweet?  (As a side note – my husband does not like sweet food at all – he rarely eats desserts).
I ate my dinner and said something like “That was great, dear, thank you.  It was a bit different than mine, a little, (hesitating)  sweet.  Did you put something unusual in it?”  He looked confused and said no, he had followed the recipe.  (Quite a triumph for him!)  My daughter then popped up from the table and went to our baking cupboard and pulled out a canister.  “Uh, Dad, is this the flour you used?”  Yes, it was.  Turns out she had been baking earlier and put the powdered sugar in the spot we usually keep the flour.  He didn’t notice the difference and used powdered sugar instead of flour!  No wonder the gravy didn’t thicken πŸ™‚
Luckily, the recipe only calls for two tablespoons of flour.  It made some pretty strange stroganoff!
Do you have a favorite cooking accident story?
6 Comments
  • Suze
    Posted at 03:30h, 17 February Reply

    My husband and I used to eat often with another couple (either dining out or at one or the other couple's home). We had invited them over and I tried a new spaghetti recipe. I always cooked the pasta and then put the sauce over it at the table. This recipe called for the pasta to be cooked and served in the sauce. I read and reread the recipe and I swear it said to put the pasta into the sauce to cook it. I could not believe it. Well, I did. It took forever to cook the spaghetti in the sauce and it was very starchy. They were very gracious about. I'm still friends with them almost 40 years later.

  • Marg
    Posted at 17:03h, 03 February Reply

    Ha, no accident story here, or at least none that I remember.

  • Molly
    Posted at 03:41h, 01 February Reply

    When I was first married and setting up house I did my initial grocery shopping for basics and then set about making a pie. Now I had made plenty of pies before so I was shocked when I looked in the oven and found a gigantic puffy mess growing out of the pie tin. It turned out I had bought self-rising flour and my crusts were turning into biscuits! What a mess. I still don't understand the point of that kind of flour but I chuckle every time I see it in the baking aisle.

  • Charlotte
    Posted at 09:33h, 31 January Reply

    hahahahaha! Oops!

  • Kimberly
    Posted at 20:58h, 30 January Reply

    Somehow I'm not surprised you are a "recipe" person. Your quilts are so precise; it just makes sense. One of my favorite cooking accident stories involves doing what the recipe said "set cast iron skillet on medium high heat for 7 minutes to preheat" and ended with the apartment complex's hard wired smoke detectors going off and the arrival of the fire department, complete with hook and ladder truck. We laugh about it now but I don't make that cajun chicken too often.

  • Beth at Quilting Hottie Haven
    Posted at 15:17h, 30 January Reply

    HA! I have no cooking accident story because I am of course perfect and would never do such a thing. πŸ™‚ I do try to cook something new every couple of weeks or so; growing up in the 70s and the "whole meatloaf, tacos, spaghetti, pork chops….repeat!" menu being my mom's nod to cooking I try to mix it up a little. Sometimes I get some less than stellar results, but hey, you have to keep it interesting.

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