to paraphrase Robert Burns.

I am a true believer in eating as ‘cleanly’ as possible.  Everyone has their own definition of what that means.  For me, I try to cook whenever I can with basic, fresh ingredients.

I wish I could make fresh, healthy meals every night but I rarely have time during the work week.  We are out the door early and return home late.  When I do decide to cook on a week night, I try to plan in advance.  I want to know exactly what I need to do when I walk through the door.

When I decided I would make “beef” stroganoff veggie style, (the shortcut version) for a Thursday night, I tried to plan ahead.  I made sure I had all the ingredients I needed on hand before I went shopping over the weekend.  I intended to use “crumbles” (textured vegetable protein), cream of mushroom soup and low-fat yogurt instead of sour cream.  Check!  All ingredients were on hand.

On Thursday, traffic was reasonably light  and we were home by 7:30 PM.  I put the water on to boil,  pulled the jar of mushrooms from the cabinet and discovered they were shitake, my least favorite kind.  No problem, I decided to chop them into tiny pieces to camouflage them.  I reached for a can of mushroom soup, only to discover it was golden mushroom which has beef broth in it.  

Since I don’t eat beef, that would not work.  No problem, I pulled some instant Lipton Beefy Onion from the cabinet.  Interestingly enough, a quick internet search revealed Lipton Beefy Onion doesn’t have any beef in it.  Thinking I better re-check the pantry for the remaining ingredients, I found my rice milk carton had been emptied, but I did spot the yogurt carton on the top shelf.

While the pasta cooked, I mixed the Lipton soup mix.  It was a lot more liquid than I remembered.  I started “browning” the crumbles and stirred the mushrooms into the skillet.  The recipe called for Worcestershire sauce and black pepper, so I added those to the mix and reached for the yogurt.  Strawberry!  Hmmm.  Well, I didn’t think I could fix this one.  By now I started thinking maybe I really wasn’t supposed to make dinner after all.  Maybe pizza night wasn’t such a bad idea.

My husband got back in the car and headed to the store for mushroom soup.  And since he was going anyway, I asked him to pick up sour cream instead of yogurt.  I tossed the cooked noodles into the skillet with the crumbles and seasonings and set it aside to wait until he got back from the store.  When he returned he brought sour cream but no cream of mushroom soup.  Total miscommunication.  He knew I had used the Liptons soup and thought I no longer needed the cream soup.

Well by this time I didn’t think it really mattered.  My carefully planned meal was not working out quite the way I anticipated it would.  Trying not to toss in the towel and order pizza, I stirred in the sour cream and a little veggie broth and forgot all about the milk.

The final product was surprisingly good.  It was not the culinary delight I had intended, but all things considered it wasn’t too bad…..