dinner, ground beef

Ground Beef Wellington from Jamie Oliver

Looking for a Sunday dinner the other afternoon and saw this and remembered I had some puff pastry in the freezer. Ground beef wellington. The pictures were enticing and hit sounded like good Sunday comfort food. I would allow 1 1/2 to 2 hours for this, as it needs to bake an hour. I was starting with frozen ground beef and frozen puff pastry so that sure added a bit–but well worth the wait. And delicious for lunch the next day!

This is from Jamie’s Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals and if you get a chance to watch his show, Fridays at 9pm about improving the school lunch program here in the US, check it out. Also, check out the Jamie Oliver web site for more great recipes and a nice forum as well.

• 2 Tbs olive oil
• 1 onion, peeled and diced
• 1 carrot, peeled and diced
• 1 stalk celery, diced
• 1 potato, peeled and diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 small can mushroom pieces, drained, or some fresh mushrooms, chopped
• some fresh rosemary, leaves pulled off the stems and chopped
• 1 cup frozen peas
• 1 egg, beaten together in a small bowl
• 1 pound ground beef
• salt and pepper to taste
• a bit of flour
• 2 sheets puff pastry, defrosted if frozen

Heat the olive oil in a skillet and preheat the oven to 350 F. Add the onion, carrot, celery, potato, mushroom and rosemary. Cook, stirring, about 8-10 minutes. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the frozen peas. The residual heat will do to thaw them.  Cool the veggie mix a bit.

In a bowl, mix together the ground beef, half the beaten egg, salt and pepper and cooled vegetable mix. Just use your hands and mix it all up.

On a floured board, roll out the puff pastry. You can put the two sheets on top of each other and roll out one big rectangle (about 12×16″) and make a large Beef Wellington or cut that into 4 smaller rectangles, as I did, to make 4 smaller ones. I was thinking we’d be eating leftovers for lunch and thought the smaller ones would work better.

Place 1/4 of the ground beef mix onto each rectangle, brush the outside long edge with some beaten egg and roll up lengthwise, pinching the edges together to seal. Put on a large cookie pan, seem side down.  Repeat for each. (You could of course make smaller portions if you’ve got younger children.)  Brush the tops with the rest of the egg and bake for an hour at 350 F.

I made these delicious creamed leeks to go with the beef wellington and it was a delightful dinner.