Beef Welling-who?

Tonight I had the opportunity to go to a cooking class. A very nice, and enthusiastic, woman named Victoria had fourteen people over in her little condo for a demonstration on how to cook beef wellington. Should that be capitalized? It sounds very formal, like the Duke of Buckingham, or whatever. Beef Wellington—sounds capitalized to me.

Okay, I'll be honest (because what else am I good at, right?) before tonight I didn't have any idea what Beef Wellington was. Beef. Okay, I deduced that bit of it. Wellington . . . I've got nothing there. It's a place in England? And in New Zealand. I've been there, but didn't notice any beef hanging around in the streets, on the billboards or at the pier. And, unlike me, I didn't bother to Google it before I left.

So I wasn't prepared. I hadn't steeled myself against the 1/2” thick layer of sliced and diced mushrooms she put under the beef. Ugh. I'm not a huge mushroom fan. Mostly it's a texture thing (they don't have a horribly offensive taste on their own) but I normally avoid them. In this case—impossible. Not only did she lay down the mushroom law on the Beef Wellington, but also on the salmon wellington.

Hey, look at that, salmon wellington doesn't have the same ring as Beef Wellington does. No caps there.

The food was still good, despite the extraneous layer of mushrooms. Although my favorite bit was the orange gelato that she made. Yum! Oh, and the potatoes. A good heap of mashed potatoes is hard to ignore. I didn't bother to try.

I'll probably never try to make Beef (or salmon) Wellington, but it was fun to watch someone make it look so easy!