My daughter-in-law Kris and I have been discussing ways to expand Saraphina’s meal choices beyond macaroni and cheese. Saraphina thought something with organic coconut might be good.

But since she liked the lamb meatballs we made a couple of weeks ago, we decided to try another meatball recipe. We chose a meatball stroganoff from the most recent issue of Cuisine at Home. We had gotten some really delicious grass fed beef from John DeBruin at a recent Sunday farmer’s market. So while that was defrosting we chopped an onion and garlic to saute and then added fresh minced parsley, bread crumbs, spices, and beaten eggs.

While the meatballs baked for 20 minutes, we brought some water to a boil for the egg noodles and started on our stroganoff. Saraphina checked the cupboard for a pan.

After she decided to plug in the mixer, Kris found her a less dangerous task to work on… whisking water in a copper bowl. (Note the bag of coconut is still handy just in case we change our minds.) The whisking took a lot of concentration so we had time to work on our mushroom slicing and measure the other ingredients.

Shaun showed Kris how to slice mushrooms by sliding the knife forward rather than pressing down.

Saraphina soon finished whisking the water.

Fortunately, the meatballs were ready for tasting and Saraphina wanted that job. She ate two!

Miranda and Joey showed up just as we were getting ready to prepare the sauce. They helped entertain Saraphina while we finished up the stroganoff and noodles. They stayed for dinner.

The sauce was a little problematic… lumpy. In the recipe, you cook the onions, then deglaze the pan with white wine. You cook the wine until it evaporates, then sprinkle in flour. This is sort of like a roux, but we didn’t have enough oil in the pan to keep the flour from crusting to the pan. When we added the broth, we ended up with clumps of undissolved flour floating in the broth. We used an immersion blender to break up the lumps and make a smooth sauce. We added sour cream and put the sauce onto the meatballs and noodles.

The meatballs were great but we all decided that the stroganoff had too much mustard. Shaun saved the day by adding some Himalayan red sea salt, grated lemon rind, and minced jalapeno. Now that was good! It went from leftovers destined for the dog bowls, to something we’ll heat up again for lunch tomorrow.

Sorry I forgot to take a photo of the finished dish. I’ll add one later if someone else doesn’t get to the leftovers before I do.