Gunfighter: A Modern Warrior's Life

Ground Beef Wellington a la Jamie Oliver: A Recipe Review

I tried out a new recipe this week, and I thought that I should share it with you.  As you can see in the title of the post, it was Ground Beef Wellington.  Now, I have never had a regular Beef Wellington, but I have always wanted to try.  The problem is that I don't like to experiment with expensive food items, so going the ground beef route seemed like a good place to start.

I'll present the recipe, and make my review after you've had a look at it.

 

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.

 

Review:  This looked like it was going to be a good recipe.  Generally speaking, I like the way that Jamie Oliver does things because his food never comes across as particularly pretentious.  I only have one Jamie Oliver cookbook, and it is one of my favorites.

This recipe is easy to make, andmore impirtantly, it is easy to change.  I say that because as the recipe is written it may prove to be very bland for the palate that enjoys a little more flair.

I didn't omit anything from the recipe, but I did add a few things here and there.

I added two links of uncooked Chorizo sausages (sans casing) to the ground beef  mixture, and for the sake of time, I used about a cup and a half of frozen hash browns instead of peeling and dicing a potato.  In addition, I used about a tablespoon of Gourmet Garden's Moroccan seasoning (which I really love).  I also added a half teaspoon of curry powder.

I followed the rest of the recipe in all respects, and in an hour, I had a nice looking dish that had the house smelling quite nice.

When it was time to serve, the dish presented quite nicely, which made me happy, because it is important to me that the food that I prepare looks good as well as tastes good.

I served the dish to Mrs Gunfighter and Soccer girl and when they tried it, I was rewarded with a resounding "Meh".

I tried it, and came up with the same result.  I was a good dish, but not a great dish.  The next time I attempt this, and I do plan to give it another go, I am going to do my usual thing and go a wee bit bonkers with my rockin' spice rack.

The Bottom Line:  Try it, but don't be afraid to change it to taste.  This is a recipe with incredible potential.  Make it your own and rock the spice rack!

Self-Delusion and National Security

Here is the problem of our times: In the early 1990's, the Soviet Union fell apart, and when it went away, the european Communist boogeyman went away. For the past generation, Soviet successor states and the nations they spawned have been eyeing each other warily, or have been actively killing each other. In either event, their threat to western europe and thereby, the United States, at least temporarily, disappeared.

What was America to do? We no longer had a ten foot tall giant to be afraid of.

Well, luckily, we didn't have to wait to long... Saddam Hussein, the toolbag Dictator-in-Chief of Iraq, was stupid enough to invade Kuwait, threatening American (business) interests in Saudi Arabia!

Well! We sure as hell weren't going to let THAT stand, now were we? (Insert remarks about Hussein being abetted and encouraged by April Glaspie and Donald Rumsfeld here).

Anyway, we smashed up a significant part of Hussein's army, and went home to live in peace, right?

Well, not so much.

At the end of the 20th century, despite not having any real, present physical threat to our security, Americans did what we normally do: We turned inward. All of a sudden, we decided that the threats to American security was our own government... and poor Mexicans.

All of a sudden, many (really stupid) Americans were convinced by powerful and dangerous interests (some of them from outside of the United States), that our own worst enemy was our (mostly) fairly elected government.

Go figure.

We started to buy into fear mongering to the point that homegrown (racist) terrorists (who call themselves "Patriots") started blowing up federal office buildings (and American children). This was bad enough, but we didn't truly start to lose our national security minds until our country was finally touched by international terrorism on a large scale.

I don't need to go into detail about certain events that took place ten years ago... You get the idea, right? So, instead of doing what we should have done about terrorism, we overreacted be came terrified of a bunch of idiots with bomb vests, and went to war (overtly) in two different countries and covertly (sorta) in at least 5 more.

Now, we have impoverished ourselves with the costs of war, and the (allegedly) most Patriotic among us are unwilling to pay them.

We have become, in the span of 20 years, an impoverished, anti-intellectual giant that hates itself (especially it's own brain). We are afraid of immigrants (and not just the illegal kind) unless they are white and Christian, we are afraid of our politicians, especially if they aren't white (or effing crazy). We fear all of these things while we waste our army, air force, and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan, doing virtually nothing to counter the only credible military threat we face: China.

Whom do we have to thank for all of this? The modern Conservative.

Be afraid for our future... but prevent disaster by not being scared into inactivity.

Be active! Be bold! Don't be afraid to speak out against those that would drive us into the night.

For God's sake, do something.