Beef Tips and Mushrooms

I love my new Crock Pot. It's been better than any other appliance in my kitchen these past few weeks. It's not that I've never owned one; this is just the first time I've used one for anything other than Velveeta cheese dip. 

The other day I took a recipe I found online that crammed cube steak, cream of mushroom soup, and Lipton onion soup mix into the slow cooker. Okay, I admitted earlier that cooking is pretty new to me (my dad used to say I could burn salad), so please excuse my stupidity ignorance when I wouldn't buy cube steak because I didn't know if it was steak or hamburger (for reasons I won't now get into, I'll eat the former, but not the latter). So I bought the beef tips. Then I forgot to buy the onion soup. So I had to work with what I had at the house.

I did add the curry powder that's in the picture; I mainly did it for color. Otherwise, it would have been...gray... and I don't think my husband would have found it too appetizing (although as my aunt says, you can roll anything in sugar, and he'd eat it). But considering this is what it looked like when I threw it in the pot, I felt doctoring was in order

About halfway through cooking, I did a taste test, and the sauce needed some spice. So I added some chili powder and black pepper to give it a little bite. After 5 hours in the pot (original recipe called for 4-6 hours), dinner was ready. 

I served it with green beans, black eyed peas, and quinoa. This was the first time I'd ever had quinoa, and the gravy was a nice touch. It tasted a lot like brown rice, so it needed something on top. The mister said he would prefer rice next time, and he did pick a lot of the mushrooms out (I thought maybe I could slide those by him), but otherwise, he did like it. 


Tonight I'm cooking Hawaiian BBQ chicken, so we'll see how that one goes.