Beef Wellington

Tesco sell bags of vacuum packed steaks, and quite often they turn up in the reduced section of the chilled aisles. They are usually a pretty good bargain, who can argue with half price British fillet steak?! As a bonus, the fact they are well sealed in the vacuum pack means you can beat them with a rolling pin for extra tenderness without getting steak juice all over the kitchen.

Since they were bargainous I figured I would try my hand at beef wellington, it was unlikely to be completely inedible, but at least if it was I would not have ruined expensive steak (see how much faith I have in my cooking skills?). It turned out very tasty, so I am sharing it here, it is maybe not the official way, but I pieced it together from ones I have seen on TV, yes I could have looked the recipe up, but never mind.

Ingredients:

Fillet steak, either one bit per person for individual ones or a bit big enough to share

Farmhouse pate, it has mushrooms in there so saves time/faffing

Puff pastry

Egg, beaten in a jug for sealing/egg wash

Anything you would like to serve with your beef wellington, I added new potatoes, peas and sweetcorn

Set the oven warming up to about 200 degrees C.

Put the steak into a hot frying pan pan to seal it on all sides, make it nicely brown then take it off the heat, leave it to sit while you do the next bit.

Roll out the pastry, you want to make a rectangle that is quite a bit more than twice the size of your chunk of steak.

Spread some pate on the pastry sheet, just off centre, covering an area the same size as the steak, then sit your nicely browned steak on top, it will look a bit like this:

Spread beaten egg around the edges of the steak

Fold the other half of the pastry over the top and fold all the edges in, give then a good squeeze to seal them (for some reason this photo has rotated 180 degrees, logically the folds would be at the bottom). Optionally egg wash the top of the parcel if you have a lot of egg leftover.

Put the parcel of tastiness onto a non stick sheet on a baking tray and into the oven until the pastry is a lovely golden brown, it will probably be fifteen to twenty minutes.

Serve up with your choice of tasty sides, enjoy eating.

As you can see I accidentally made HUGE parcels. When the steaks came out of the bag they looked a bit small and feeble so I did one each. This is deceptive as we could have comfortably shared one parcel between two people.