| Tuesday, December 26, 2006 |
| Tradition |
So......I'm back, after a much less harrowing drive. I hope you all had a wonderful Holiday weekend with your families and friends, or simply enjoyed the quiet peacefulness of a long weekend.
As with most families, we have pretty specific traditions for the Holidays. Those traditions have evolved over the years depending on age and circumstance, but for the last 15 years or so, one of them has been that we celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve with a large family dinner, and open our gifts. This allows my siblings with in-laws and out-laws to open gifts at home with their kids and have dinner with their families on Christmas Day.
The other tradition has been that my Mom and I cook Christmas Eve dinner and I buy most /all of the ingredients as one of my gifts for the family. Most years we do an elaborate seafood dish, but this year, we did something a little different and very, very, elegant.
To make these individual Beef Wellingtons, you must start with very, very, nice fillet mignon....
Searing them quickly in some olive oil gives them a lovely crust, and prepares them for all the lovely fillings that will go with them.
Next, we have to assemble them. After I rolled out pastry dough into ten inch rounds, I cut a four by three inch rectangle in the center and started to layer. First, it's a layer of spinach, topped with some good crumbled blue cheese:
Now, we add a layer of caramelized onions with lots of sherry, a seared fillet, a layer of marinated portobello mushrooms and some more spinach....
From here, we wrap up all the ends, starting with the short ones, seal them, wash the entire thing with an egg wash to make it shiny, and add decorative cut outs from all the edges we cut out of the circles. It helps to have a Mom that is a very talented artist at this point, who can actually create 30+ individual holly leaves from pastry dough and stick them on the eleven individual Wellingtons.
After the oven, slice open the present to show the green and holiday red, toss some pomegranate seeds for the Holly Berries, and VOILA! Happy Holidays! We served this with an arugula field salad with oranges, red onions, pomegranate seeds, and goat cheese.
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posted by Broadsheet @ 9:35 PM   |
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| 4 Editorial Opinions: |
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OMG this looks like MELT in your MOUTH beef!! YUM! Did you take these pics with your phone??
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Sally: Nope - I used a real camera, but I didn't use a flash, and the light was low, so the first one is a little blurry.
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I think you should invite me over for a re-creation!
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I'm drooling over here! You've made me so hungery. Those pictures look good enough to eat!
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OMG this looks like MELT in your MOUTH beef!! YUM! Did you take these pics with your phone??