Slow Cooker Beef Stroganoff i

While I am far (FARRRRR SOOOO FARRRRRR) from a genius in the kitchen, I can't say there is much I love more than cooking, especially cooking for other people. I am the kind of dinner party host who will go WAY OVERBOARD 9 times out of 10. Maybe this is because currently I live alone, and cooking for one is not nearly as fun as it is tricky/challenging and leftovers bore me to tears unless the leftovers are pizza which I could eat morning, noon and night and probably in my sleep. It could also be because I love to make people happy and food makes people happy (if food doesn't make you happy, we probably can't be friends). Primarily, however, I think it has a lot to do with the mother who raised me, who always threw the perfect parties at our home, and had the best serving ware and made everything classy and most of all hip. My mother was way up on food trends, fancy cheeses and you bet I inherited all of that from her (although she never to my knowledge owned a slow cooker). I loved watching her put parties together, especially around the holidays and taking notes on the delicious dishes she would make and how much she looked forward to serving them the way I looked forward to eating them. 

I'm not sure if this is going to become a regular feature on the blog or not, but here's a recipe I recently tried that I loved. It made enough for me to have two portions, give two portions to a friend for her to eat when she was hungover and still have extras. 

Slow Cooker Beef Stroganoff 

Ingredients:
1.5-2lbs of beef stew meat (whatever cut really, doesn't matter)
2 cups of mushrooms - I used cremini and a whole bag because I love mushrooms 
2 packs of gravy seasoning - I used one brown gravy and one mushroom gravy because yolo
one large union, chopped up into chunks 
1 and a half cups of water
4oz cream cheese (you can use light)
8oz of sour cream (I used low fat and full fat mixed because that's what I had. Also I probably ended up using more than 8oz so sue me)
egg noodles (in the photo I used fettucine because Target didn't have any egg noodles. WTF TARGET)
cornstarch 
parsley (I mean you could use fresh but I rarely care about this because I am lazy and keeping fresh herbs around when you live alone seems really pointless most of the time)
salt and pepa 

Directions:
1. spray the inside of the slow cooker with cooking spray
2. mix both gravy packets with the water in the slow cooker until it isn't super lumpy 
3. chop the onion and put the onion, mushrooms and the beef in the slow cooker and stir it around to coat with the sauce
4. put the lid on and cook that baby on low 6-8 hours. Probably more like 8 unless you are really impatient. 
5. Open the lid when there is like 20-30 minutes left and put the cream cheese in and put the lid back on. 
6. when time is up, stir in at least half the sour cream. See how that goes. If the sauce doesn't thicken enough, add in some cornstarch and let it sit a little and/or add more sour cream. go as creamy/thick as you want to go really. 
7. make the noodles. yummm. cook them according to the package directions because obviously. 
8. sprinkle on parsley, salt and pepa to taste
9. serve over the noodles with a dollop of sour cream and sprinkle more parsley on it if you are down with that