Mushroom Wellington- Daring Cooks December

Well after being 2 months (!) late on posting my last challenge I couldn't lame out and wait until February to post about December's challenge; which was to make some kind of savory puff pastry dish. The obvious application was either salmon en croute or beef wellington. Now I don't really like fish so salmon was out. And try as I might I couldn't get excited about the beef wellington. Maybe it was the fact that in the past two weeks I've worked my way through a 12 sticks of butter making Kwan/han/Chris/Festivus cookies for my many adoring family members, friends, classmates and even my professors. I made Chocolate Chip Cookies with Hawaiian sea salt, (I promise you these are the best cookies ever and even if you cut corners and use cheap nestle chips and don't refrigerate it for 72 hours they will still taste awesome) Molly from Orangette's chocolate rads, super wickedly easy peanut butter cookies and my godmother's raspberry bars. Not to mention I celebrated Hanukkah, which in addition to be the festival of light, is also the festival of frying things in oil. Oh yeah and there was thanksgiving in the not so distant past and Christmas in the not so distant future. So between all of that rich cooking and eating I just couldn't justify buying and eating filet mignon. Save it for another day.

So in the spirit of the challenge but not the letter, I decided to make my own recipe and creating my own Mushroom Wellington

For the puff pastry I used a recipe that I got from a savory pastry class that I attended at L'Academie Cuisine in Bethesda. This recipe from epicurious is close enough. You can also buy puff pastry from peperridge farms. It is not as good as the real thing but will do in a pinch. I only needed about a third of the dough, the rest is in my freezer for annother day.

For the filling, I created two different mushroom dishes. The base was a mushroom duxelle (which is often used as part of the filling for a traditional Beef Wellington) The recipe goes something like this:

Duxelles

1 tablespoons butter

1/2 pound cremini (aka baby bella) mushrooms, finely chopped (chop them as finely as you can)

1/4 cup minced shallots

2 tablespoons minced garlic

6 tablespoons wine (port would be best but all I had on hand was white wine)

black pepper and salt

1/2 cup of bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

In a large saute pan, heat the butter When it has melted and hot, add the mushrooms and saute for 6 minutes. Add the shallots and garlic and continue to saute for 4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add the port wine and cook until almost all the liquid has cooked off, about 4 to 6 minutes. Remove the duxelle from the pan and cool completely and then mix in bread crumbs.

Sauted Mushrooms:

4-6 oz of wild mushrooms (I used shitake and chantrelles) sliced

1 tbl butter

parsley

salt and pepper

Heat the butter in the pan and then throw in the sliced mushrooms. Mushrooms should soften in about 4-6 minutes. Throw in chopped parsley for a little color and season to taste.

To assemble:

Roll out puff pastry to about a 12 inches by 9. Place duxelle mixture in the middle of the pastry and then layer the sauted mushrooms on top.

With a sharp knife, cut the pastry either side of the filling, into strips. Start in the left hand corner and work at a forty-five degree angle towards the filling. Then repeat on the right hand side.

Fold in the pastry ends first and then cross over the pastry strips from alternate sides.

When the mixture is well-wrapped within the pastry, glaze the pastry parcel with the beaten egg. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

Serves 4

Better Late then Never... October Daring Cooks Challenge: PHO!

So you'd think that with all the time I spend online reading other people's blogs and surfing various forums I'd find the time to update my sad neglected corner of the Internets but then you'd be wrong. I hang my head in shame. It did not help that I plain skipped November's challenge but more on that in a little bit.

October's challenge was Pho, a Vietnamese beef soup. DC is home to many shopping mall center pho joints, some good and other mediocre. My first experience with pho was unfortunately at a mediocre place where the soup tasted kind of flat and non-dimensional. After that I just didn't really try the soup again for a couple of years. The next time I tried it was several years later. I liked the pho I had better but with so many wonderful restaurants competing for my meager paychecks I never really thoguht about another pho trip. And it never occured to me to try making my own, until Jaden of Steamy Kitchen challenged us to make it.

Probably the best part of this recipe was just finding the ingredients! I got to shop at two grocery stores I'd love to patronize more often. I went to my local co-op to buy spices whole sale. The co-op prices are very high but they have all kinds of items you can't get at other places. The other fun store was H-Mart. I've heard great stuff about that store and all of it was true. Their produce is super duper cheap and very fresh. My budget quickly went out the window when I saw all kinds of things I wanted to buy from udon noodles to pocky to korean style fried chicken. Yum!

This was one of the more challenging recipes I've made for Daring Cooks. I know that I say that almost every month but this was one time when I really thought I'd screwed up beyond all help. Part of the problem was that first I forgot to toast the spices, and then I was super busy and kept being interupted so I couldn't get the 3 hour block to make the darn soup. I ended up starting the boiling the soup and then putting the whole pot in my fridge to cook for later. The result was that since I didn't completly boil off the scum, the soup was grey and nasty looking and i was panicking that I had spent all this time and money on a total waste. Fortunatlly once I strained the soup and boiled off the nasty bits, the resulting broth was so flavorful and delcious that i couldn't wait to eat it! The soup was clear and full of complex flavors. With every spoonful you could taste the pure beefiness, the salt, spicy, sweetness of the different spicing on top of the freshess noodles and cilantro. It's the perfect dish for a cold rainy night in fall. And for a change, besides forgetting to toast the spices and not finding star anise, I didn't alter the recipe one bit. Sometimes following the rules works!



This desert was an optional challenge to try deep frying wontons and making some kind of desert. I wanted to make cream cheese wontons, which I occasionally order as a snack from a takeout joint in Northeast. All I had on hand with peach cream cheese my sister had brought up from wegmans. Since I wasn't wild about the cream cheese by itself I added in some chocolate. Chocolate makes many things better including this desert. My husband poo-pooed this desert every step of the way until he ate it and demanded seconds and thirds. Alas I had used the rest of the wontons (you can't seem to buy them in packs smaller than 75 or 100) in huge dumpling/wonton making extravaganza with my sister. This adventure was sadly undocumented by cameras but including me making the dumplings dough from a few months ago since she likes doughy dumplings and us struggling to steam said dumplings in the steaming tray of my rice cooker.

The desert was super easy. You just put a small amount of chocolate and cream cheese in a wonton, fold it up, seal it with egg wash (water will do just fine) and then deep fry it in about 2-3 inches of hot oil for about 3 minutes. Spoon the wantons out and blot them on a paper towel and then serve with a little sugar and (in my case) ice cream!

I'm sad to say that I lamed out of doing the November challenge, which was Sushi. I don't like sushi, don't like eating fish and just got too busy to think out non fish alternatives before the deadline.

Links

Jaden's recipe for Pho