Week 3 - Russian

Week 3 of the 52 week cooking challenge brought something new into our kitchen - Russian cuisine! While we've had Russian food before at places like Teremok (sadly now closed) and Onegin (which I think is also closed) here in the city, we've never made it at home, so this was something completely new. After reading through lots of recipes for Russian dishes, the one that seemed to make the most sense for a challenge family dinner was a recipe for turkey stroganoff that I found on Simply Recipes. Although we had definitely heard of stroganoff before (mostly beef stroganoff), A and I weren't actually sure we'd ever eaten it before, so that made this one a little hard to judge in terms of whether my finished product came close to what a stroganoff should be.

According to Wikipedia, stroganoff as it has evolved today in many parts of the world consists of meat (usually beef), mushrooms, onions, and a sour cream sauce over pasta or rice. This recipe certainly seemed to classify as a stroganoff based on that description. In our adapted version, we used the following ingredients:

- 1 package of white mushrooms, sliced ($3.99)
- 1 onion, chopped ($0.35)
- 2 tbsp butter ($0.20)
- 1 lb ground turkey ($4.35)
- 1/8 tsp nutmeg ($0.10)
- 1 tbsp dried thyme ($0.20)
- 1/2 cup sour cream ($0.50)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)
- 1 package of pasta (brown rice fusilli) ($1.99)

While stroganoff is often accompanied by egg noodles, we obviously couldn't do that here for allergy reasons, so we just went with some brown rice fusilli since it would also be able to hold the sauce decently well. The original recipe was also targeted at Thanksgiving leftovers, using turkey and gravy, but since it was January, we opted for ground turkey. The estimated cost for the entire recipe was $11.73. It would have been under $10 if we got the mushrooms from Trader Joe's instead of our local Superfresh since the package there is slightly smaller and cheaper, but for dinner for three plus a little left over for lunch, that's really not a bad price.

After two very long cooking challenges that took more time than we anticipated, I am happy to say that this recipe took less than an hour from start to finish. (Finally!) The steps for making the stroganoff were:

1. Dry saute the mushrooms until they release water (about 5 min).

2. Add the butter and onions, and cook until onions are done.

3. Make pasta at some point while everything else is cooking.

4. Add ground turkey, nutmeg, black pepper, and thyme, and cook turkey, breaking it up as it cooks, until done.

5. Remove from heat and add sour cream. Mix well.

Pretty simple to execute, and probably could have been done faster if the turkey had completely finished thawing before we started cooking. It was nice to finally make something for a challenge meal that didn't take two hours.

So, how was the stroganoff? I liked it, but not as much as some other pasta dishes we've made before. It seemed relatively basic in flavor, and you couldn't really taste the thyme or the nutmeg, just the sour cream, turkey, and black pepper. A found it a little bit bland. B didn't seem to be a huge fan of it for dinner either, but he had had cheese and Cheerios for a snack not that much earlier, so that may have also played a role. He was willing to eat it for lunch another day, but nowhere near as enthusiastically as the fajita pasta bake we made another night (which was a bigger hit with the whole family). Also, we have no idea whether or not it was really representative of what stroganoff should be, since we don't think we have anything to compare it to, or how "Russian" it really tasted, given that that was the challenge. Conclusion - good dinner, glad we tried it, but don't think it'll make it into our regular rotation.