Best Beef Stroganoff. Ever.

A few weeks ago I bought a container of mushrooms at Costco. I don't know why, but they were good looking and cheap--so I made some super mushroomy beef stroganoff.

I perused many online recipes and scoured all my cookbooks for proportions and seasonings. So the end result is the best beef stroganoff recipe ever. Ever. It is creamy, mushroomy, scrumptious. It freezes and reheats well. One pint easily serves two people over egg noodles or rice.

My recipe/method yields about 5.5 pints.

Step 1: brown about 1lb of very thinly sliced beef in a few tablespoons of olive oil. If you are more of a meat lover than me you could easily double the meat.
Step 2: Add two sliced onions and keep on cooking until the pan is dry and the onions are cooked down. The pan will look like it is all burned, but it isn't.Step 3: Remove the beef and onions. The pan will look scary, but don't freak out. That stuff is delicious.Step 4: Pour about 2-3 cups of any old white wine into the pan, bring to a simmer,and scrape up all that brown stuff.Step 5: Dump in a huge Costco sized package of mushroom that you've sliced (about 2 pounds worth). Simmer for a long time, until the wine is mostly gone. Then add 4 cloves of minced garlic and cook until the liquid is all gone (don't burn the garlic!).

Maybe I should call this "beef" stroganoff or simply mushroom stroganoff since there's not much beef in it relative to the mushrooms. I only put beef in because Dave likes it anyway...
Step 6: Remove the mushroom mixture and melt about 2 tablespoons of butter in the pan.Step 7: When the butter is melted, turn off the heat and sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of flour and whisk into the butter.Turn the heat back to medium and cook for just a few minutes while stirring so the flour doesn't burn. It'll be like paste.Step 8: Pour a little beef stock in and whisk immediately to get all the lumps out. It'll get mighty thick.
Then keep stirring stock in and whisking out the lumps until you've added about 2-3 cups of stock. Let it come to a simmer for a few minutes and keep whisking. It'll get a little thicker.

(Congrats...now you're a fancy chef who is worthy of your own cooking show because you just successfully made roux (the butter + flour concoction). You could have added milk and some cheese instead of the stock to make alfredo. Or used the stock + roux as gravy if you let it thicken a little more. Rule of thumb: use 1T butter and 1T flour for each cup of liquid for a gravy-like thickness sauce.)

Step 9: Stir in about a cup of softened cream cheese and about 2/3 cup sour cream. Then add 2 teaspoons of prepared mustard, 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce, and a teaspoon of dill (I know that sounds shady with beef, but trust me it is goooooooooooood). Then add the beef and the mushroom stuff. Add salt/pepper to your liking.
Step 10: Stick it into freezer jars, label, and put in the freezer for quick dinners later. All you have to do is boil up some noodles to go with it. Yummy!