Delia's Mini Boeufs en Croute

By Helen
Main ingredients:

• Fillet steak
• Puff pastry
• Dried and fresh mushrooms

Like my last attempt, this one was clearly going to take a bit more than half an hour. The steak was briefly seared on each side and then parcelled up in thinly-rolled puff pastry with a concentrated mixture of minced onions and mushrooms (or cauliflower for the fungi-haters).

Although it didn't seem that fiddly at first, everything had to be cooked in several separate stages. Cooking down the mushrooms (and leaving to cool), searing the steak (and leaving to cool), and then combining the two with pastry (and chilling for half an hour) before baking for 25 minutes, all meant that I was clattering pans for most of the afternoon.

The finished 'posh pasties' looked pretty impressive and went down a treat with cauliflower and broccoli cheese and mashed potatoes, but a slightly hot oven and variable steak sizes meant all were cooked a little more thoroughly than we'd have liked. To my taste the mushroom sauce was lacking in richness too and could have benefitted from the addition of some wine (although I did miss out the brandy I was for some unexplained reason supposed to brush over the steaks so that might have helped!)

Overall a good-looking plate of food which didn't hang around, but the recipe didn't necessarily add much to good-quality steaks that might have been better treated more simply. Price per head: £5.19.

Best for... A date who's impressed by French and a little technical skill

Taken from... Delia Smith - How to Cook: Book Two

Chris says... It may have ended up looking more like a Cornish pasty than a Beef Wellington, but it was the tastiest Cornish pasty I've ever had!