I made Hungarian goulash following the recipe found at this link: http://homecooking.about.com/od/beefrecipes/r/blbeef166.htm.  At least I think it was authentic Hungarian goulash, although I’ve never made it before and have no idea how the idea occurred to me.  I used sirloin tip but I think a less expensive cut – bottom round or even stew meat – would have worked just as well.  The only change I made from the recipe was to double the amount of mushrooms called for and cook it for 6 hours on low in the crockpot instead of a Dutch oven after all the meat-browning and vegetable-sweating was done.  Linda gave it a “10 out of 10, at least for this kind of recipe” and said she would eat it again.  By this kind of recipe she meant easy, inexpensive and tasty.  We’re not going to serve it to the Queen when she stops by for a visit, but we’ll have it again.

Yesterday brought home another illustration of the advantages of buying/dealing locally.  We screwed around for 3 months with one of the big national banks trying to re-finance our condo and it never got done.  They need this, they need that, blah blah blah.  I finally told them to piss up a rope and made an inquiry at Linda’s local credit union.  Four weeks and very little aggravation later – yesterday – we closed on a new mortgage at a great rate.  So beef is better, for a lot of reasons, when purchased locally and banking is better, too.  I’ll be moving all my accounts to the credit union soon.