In the last few weeks I've finished off the lamb and sandwich/soup sections of 15 minute meals and today I closed another chapter as I decided to cook the only beef meal left. Sadly it was rather heavy in the mushroom department - a sprinkling of oysters, along with a mushroom sauce - I wouldn't be able to pick the mushrooms out of that one. The good news however was that the recipe did include some rather delicious looking, unadulterated fillet steaks. Oh, and some actual cream! Not natural yoghurt, cottage cheese or any other imposter, no beautiful calorie laden single cream! Jamie must have had a few calories to play around with.
It's obviously not a cheap meal to cook - 15 minute meals don't really get much more expensive than those with fillet steak - but the ingredients didn't look like they should cause any problems, either in finding them or cooking them. As it turned out though, Waitrose were out of tenderstem broccoli. I decided to get some purple sprouting as a replacement - they're both quite thin and stalky so thought it would work.
Everything is straightforward to cook, but there definitely some timing issues. Now, the steak should be taking about 4-5 minutes to cook for a nice medium-rare. Potatoes (if they're small) should be about 12 minutes. Broccoli maybe 6 minutes, cabbage slightly less and peas just a couple of minutes. (I've not idea how long mushrooms take to be honest). But the recipe tells you to start with the potatoes (so far so good) but then almost immediately add the cabbage and get the steaks going and only add the broccoli and peas right at the end. As a result of this you end up with overcooked cabbage, cold steak (I put it in the oven to keep it warm) and undercooked broccoli.
It must have all had an effect on me, because I ended up melting the food processor (not terminally so, fortunately) and forgetting to take a photo of it all before serving up. None of that affected the taste though - the steak was melt in your mouth delicious and the greens were ok. I didn't really go near the sauce but Lolz told me it was alright.
Lolz gave the dish 9/10. Difficulty rating 4/10.
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