Quick Beef Stroganoff

 

The recipe for Quick Beef Stroganoff was this:

1.  Buy a Hormel brand package of Beef Tips and Gravy;

2.  Microwave according to the package instructions;

3.  Boil 12 ounces of egg noodles and salt to taste;

4.  Poor heated beef tips and gravy over the drained egg noodles;

5.  Add a dollop of sour cream with two tablespoons of Heinz Chili Sauce and mix thoroughly.

Goins’ wife and daughter liked the dish and, so, he prepared it weekly.  Perhaps, the instructions for making Quick Beef Stroganoff don’t really deserve to be called a “recipe”.  Goins had just combined a couple of food items to make this dish.  But isn’t that the essence of a recipe?

One weekend, while shopping at the grocery, Goins saw that there was a special on fresh sliced mushrooms.  He bought a package, sauteed them in butter with a dash of garlic, and, then, added them to his Stroganoff.  This seemed to Goins to be more like actual cooking and he thought that the addition would much improve the dish.  A few years earlier, Goins had ordered Beef Stroganoff at a Russian restaurant called Moscow on the Hill.  (“The Hill” was an old neighborhood centered around a big Catholic cathedral that overlooked the city below in the river valley.)  At the restaurant, the Beef Stroganoff, of course, was excellent and Goins recalled that the dish was prepared with mushrooms and, probably, red wine in which the meat had been braised.  

Although Goins daughter thought the mushrooms made the dish better tasting and more elegant, Goins wife, was appalled.  

“Why do you always tinker with recipes?” she asked him.

“I like to be creative,” Goins said.  “It feels more like cooking.”

“How long have we been married?” Goins wife, Teresa asked.

“Thirty years,” he said, “give or take a few.”

“And in 30 years of marriage – or 32 years to be exact – you haven’t learned that I hate mushrooms?”

“I thought it depended on how they were prepared,” Goins said.  

He told her that you could barely taste the mushrooms in the Beef Stroganoff.

“I can taste them just fine,” Teresa replied.

“Well, I thought you wouldn’t mind,” Goins said.

“When have you ever seen me eat mushrooms?”

Goins thought she had ordered food containing mushrooms at an Italian restaurant where they sometimes ate.  But he wasn’t sure and didn’t think it prudent to quarrel with her.

“It hurts my feelings,” Teresa said.  “To think that after being married for 32 years, you still don’t know what I don’t like to eat.  Have you paid any attention to me at all?”

Goins didn’t answer.

Jesse, Goins’ daughter, helpfully said that she liked the mushrooms in the dish.

He had been teaching Jesse to drive and she was grateful for his efforts.  Goins was a careful driver and was successful in Jesse’s instruction with one exception: he had been unable to teach her how to parallel park.  This was because he didn’t know how to perform this maneuver himself.  Of course, once he had mastered this skill well enough to pass a license test himself, but that was many years ago and, in almost all cases, he avoided situations requiring this sort of parking.  

A couple years earlier, Goins and Teresa celebrated their anniversary at Moscow on the Hill.  There were several trendy bars and a couple of other cafes at the intersection where the Russian restaurant was located.  It was an old neighborhood, six blocks from the brooding hulk of the cathedral, ancient brownstones lining the side-streets near the Victorian commercial buildings at the place where the two avenues met.  A park fenced with black cast-iron spears was nearby and there was a tiny chapel shingled on all walls and roof with a small open watchtower overlooking the copse of trees arranged around an alabaster basin irrigated by an angel or, perhaps, just a virgin pouring water from a bronze jug. Sometimes Goins and his wife mistimed the traffic and arrived early for their reservation and they had sat at a bench in the little park across from the fountain listening to the water splashing and the birds singing in the twilight. 

It was snowy on the night of their anniversary and traffic had been snarled on the freeways and so, this evening, they were late for the dinner reservation.  Goins couldn’t find any place to park, although several times, as he circled the block, he passed a space requiring parallel parking.  

“Right there!” Goins’ wife pointed.

“I don’t think I can get in there,” Goins said.

“It looks like a big space,” she said.

Goins braked and tried to enter the parking spot without parallel parking.  This effort failed.  He drove around the block.  The brownstones frowned at him with vague disapprobation.  The commercial buildings were dark with heavy cornices leaking slush.  The Cathedral on its hilltop was turbulent with Gothic windows and buttresses and little towers.  

Goins passed the opening among the cars parked along the curb, stopped, put his Volvo in reverse, but something went wrong and he couldn’t fit the vehicle into the space.  He pulled ahead, almost clipping a car that had slipped by him.  Again, he tried to park but the geometry eluded him.  Someone was honking.  Embarrassed, Goins fled the spot, made a left turn at the intersection between the steep, brick commercial buildings.  He saw a small parking lot, next to a flat modern structure beside the cast-iron fence protecting the maiden with the jug.  An accessible space beckoned to him and he nosed his car into that spot.  Sleet was falling and the sidewalks were slippery.

After their dinner, Goins and his wife were a little giddy with vodka.  They held hands as they walked to the place where he had parked his car.  The slipperiness underfoot had vanished and it seemed that they could dance on the wet sidewalks.

Goins’ car was missing.  It had been towed.  The lot was apparently a no-parking zone, associated with a convent where retired nuns who served at the cathedral lived.  A sign clearly posted above where Goins had parked provided a telephone number for the impound lot where the car had been taken.  

In his haste to make the reservation, Goins had left his cell-phone in the car.  Teresa’s cell-phone had no power.  Goins noticed a pale, yellow light glowing in a window between the shingled walls of the chapel.  He climbed the stone steps to a wooden porch protecting the chapel’s old double-doors.  A sign said that the place was a Swedenborgian Church.  Goins knocked but no one came to the door.  He turned the brass knob and the door opened and gave inward.

A short corridor led into a bigger room lined with pews.  Concentric wooden circles were at the front of the sanctuary.  The place had a nautical aspect with little windows like portholes.

A very beautiful old man appeared at the side of the meeting room.  His white beard was luminous.  Goins told him that his car had been towed.

“Oh heavens!” the old man exclaimed.  He told Goins that this sort of misfortune happened often and that parking in the neighborhood could be difficult.  Goins asked if he could use a phone.  The old man nodded and led him into a room with many old books and a wooden lectern where a heavy Bible bound in leather was open.  The telephone was antique, made from black enamel with a rotary dial.  Goins called the impound lot, verified that his car was there, and, then, wrote down the address.  He asked the old man if he could make another call.  “Of course,” the old man with the white beard said.  Goins lifted the receiver but realized that he didn’t know the number of Yellow Cab and there was no phone book in the small, book-lined chamber.  He told the old man that he would make this call from the restaurant.

“If you need anything,” the old man said, “come back.  We are always here to help.”

Goins thanked him.  Teresa was sitting in the back pew of the chapel, her eyes closed.  Their evening was spoiled.  They went to Moscow on the Hill and asked the hostess to call a cab.

The Volvo was located in a sort of frigid hell next to downtown, several dead end streets between crumbling warehouses and salvage yards full of jagged blocks of crushed metal.  The air smelled of spilt oil and rust.  The man in the shack at the impound lot had only one eye and sat behind panes of crazed plexi-glass.  It was expensive to ransom the car.  Goins had the money, but he felt angry and humiliated.  The one-eyed man was alternately threatening and servile.  

On the way home, Goins’ wife said: “You really should learn to parallel park.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he replied.

“You should have let me try,” she said.  “I still know how to do it.”

Goins tried parallel parking a few times when he was teaching Jesse.  But each effort was unsuccessful.  The car either ended up on the curb or blocking traffic on the street.  Because he didn’t know how to parallel park, Jesse failed that part of the license test.  She knocked over the cones defining the space where she was supposed to park or ended up on the curb.  After her third fail, for which Goins blamed himself, the man administering the test, told her to sign up for three sessions with a professional driving instructor.  Jesse completed those sessions and passed the test the next time she took it. 

A month after she received her driver’s license, Jesse tried to parallel park in front of a friend’s house.  She misjudged the space and backed Goins’ car into a fire-hydrant.  The rear bumper was damaged and the red plastic lens covering the left-side parking light was shattered.  Jesse was tearful.

“It’s my fault,” Goins said.  “I never taught you how to parallel park.”

“I will never drive again,” Jesse said.

“That’s nonsense,” Goins told her.  “Listen, you have to be alert.  You have to always know what is around you when you are driving a car.”

Later one of Jesse’s friends came and she left for the night.  

Goins was sitting in his easy chair watching TV.  People were competing on an obstacle course equipped with lagoons full of jello and gaudy towers. Teresa was doing laundry.

“Jesse feels very bad about the car,” Teresa said.

“I know,” Goins replied.

“Well, I don’t want her to be so sad,” Teresa added.

“She shouldn’t be sad,” Goins said.  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

Teresa said that this was very true.

Goins said: “I recall once that I was driving all alone in the country.  A little kid, maybe five years old, darted out from nowhere, just appeared, and I couldn’t stop.  I remember she had golden hair that seemed luminous to me.  The kid was knocked into the ditch.  I backed up and saw the child lying there in the weeds.  I recall the sun on her hair.”

“And?” Teresa asked.

“The little child wasn’t moving,” Goins said.  “But there was no-one around.  No one at all.  I didn’t even see any farmhouses nearby but there must have been a place somewhere around.  Anyway, I didn’t get out of the car.  I just drove away, leaving the little kid in the ditch.”

“That’s not true,” Teresa said.  “Why would you say a thing like that?”

“It is true.”

“Why would you say a thing like that?” Teresa asked again.

“I never told you,” Goins said.  “There’s lots about me that you don’t know.”

Teresa sniffed.  She said that the load of laundry was done and that she had to take it out of the dryer.