Happy New Decade!

Wow its been so long! The past couple of years have been really busy – one of the reasons for the lack of posts on this blog. Left England, moved to the States, went back to school, bought a house in Raleigh, NC. So I am starting to feel settled again and the urge to cook has returned. So for NYE, hubby and I decided to have a quiet one in but thought I would still try to cook something decadent. I went for bacon-wrapped filet mignons. They were fun to make and soooo good!

Raw bacon-wrapped filet mignon

They’re really easy to make. First, let your filets sit out for about 20-30 min to bring them to room temperature. Then, check them over to see if there’s any silver skin or fat to be cut off. Then, rub some olive oil into them and season generously with sea salt and black pepper. Once you’ve finished seasoning them, wrap one piece of bacon around the filet and secure with a toothpick. Insert the toothpick where the bacon overlaps. Don’t wrap them too snug or too loose otherwise they will come apart.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, put some butter in a frying pan over medium-high heat. Once the foam of the butter subsides, put the filets in. Brown them on the top and bottom (about 3-4 min each side). Once browned, transfer them to baking safe dish and put in oven. You will want to check them in 5-10 min intervals with a meat thermometer. Rare is about 120-125, medium is around 140-150 and well done is 160-170. Once done to your liking, take them out of the oven and let them sit for about 5 min.

Bacon-wrapped filet mignon with sauteed veggies

I served mine with baked potatoes and asparagus and portabello mushrooms sauteed in olive oil, garlic and salt and pepper.

Hope everyone had a safe and happy new year! I look forward to a year of more cooking, baking and food blogging!

Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie

My mother-in-law bought me a Nigella Lawson cookbook recently and I found a recipe for what resembles an American style pot-pie but with a slightly different filling. As my husband loves his savory pies, I thought I would try this one out.

I didn’t have two pie pots like the recipe calls for so I used a round shallow glass dish. It seemed to work just fine except the filling and the pastry didn’t touch. The only change I would make is to add a bit more flour as the sauce didn’t seem thick enough for my taste, but it was good nonetheless!

Chicken, Mushroom and Bacon Pie
Source: “Nigella Express” by Nigella Lawson. Published by Chatto & Windus 2007.

Ingredients:

3 rashers of bacon, cut into strips
1 teaspoon garlic oil
1/2 cup of mushrooms
1/2 lb of chicken thigh fillets, cut into pieces
2 Tablespoons of all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 Tablespoon of butter
1 1/4 cup of hot chicken stock
1 Tablespoon of Marsala (I used red wine vinegar)
1 sheet of all-butter ready-rolled puff pastry

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. In a heavy-based frying pan, fry the bacon strips in the oil until beginning to crisp, then add the sliced mushrooms and soften them in the pan with the bacon.

Turn the chicken strips in the flour and thyme (you could toss them about in a freezer bag), and then melt the butter in the bacon-and-mushroom pan before adding the floury chicken and all the flour left in the bag. Stir around with the bacon and mushrooms until the chicken begins to color.

Pour in the hot stock and Marsala, stirring to form a sauce, and let this bubble away for about 5 minutes. Take two 300ml pie-pots (if yours are deeper, don’t worry, there will simply be more space between contents and puff pastry top) and make a pastry rim for each one – by this I mean an approx 1cm strip curled around the top of each pot. Dampen the edges with a little water to make the pastry stick.

Cut a circle bigger than the top of each pie-pot for the lid, and then divide the chicken filling between the two pots.
Dampen the rim of the pastry again and then pop on the lid of each pie, sealing the edges with your fingers or the underneath of the prongs of a fork.

Cook pies for about 20 minutes turning them around halfway through cooking. Once cooked, they should have puffed up magnificently.