Beef Wellington

My pictures don't do this dish justice.  Actually the one I made probably doesn't do this dish justice, but hey it was my first try. Well, the one I'm posting was actually my second try, but shh, no one needs to know.

It's a very interesting process.  Beef wellington is beef tenderloin (expensive cut of meat) seared and covered in mustard.  Then wrapped in mushroom duxelle (mushroom puree), ham or bacon, all wrapped up in puff pastry!

If you want to see what it looks like inside and read more about the process. Click on "Le Jump" below!

Funny story.  I don't have a food processor to properly puree the mushrooms.  But I do have a really old blender.  Blenders are hard to use when there's no liquid or anything in it.  I sliced up the crimini mushrooms and as it was running, I slowly pushed the mushrooms down with a spoon.. It was getting closer to the blade and I wasn't paying attention. Then the spoon hit the blade, the spoon flew out and so did a bunch of pureed mushrooms!  It actually went on the ceiling...yeahh, that was a pain to clean.  But I can't believe I actually had one of those cartoon-like blender exploding moments in real life...

It was a beautiful pink color inside!  There's this kind of excitement and anxiousness when cutting into one of these.  Is it overdone? Underdone? and once you slice into it, there's no turning back! If you bake it again, you'll lose juices and the pastry might get soggy.

I used a whole grain mustard to cover the beef and bacon to wrap it up in.  It probably would have been better to use ham 'cause a lot of the fat from the bacon seeps out.  But bacon makes so many things taste better!

Anyways, it was really fun to make and quite a challenge! I can't wait to have more food adventures!

Up next: Creamy arugula pesto pasta