Portobello mushroom Wellington

I wanted to make a nice looking vegetarian dish for the Christmas table, and I thought of a mushroom Wellington. Many recipes for this sort of a dish exist, but this one is my own. I thought it would be nice to put parsnips into the wrapping with the mushroom and also to give it a bit more flavour with a walnut pesto type of a sauce.

So here is my simple recipe for portobello mushroom Wellingtons.

Ingredients

Mushrooms:

4 large portobello mushrooms

3tbsp olive oil

600g puff pastry

1 parsnip

1 egg

50g emmental cheese

Pesto:

25g basil leaves

50g walnuts

4tbsp olive oil

1-2 garlic cloves

Method

First of all make the pesto by pureeing the pesto ingredients together to a paste. Put the pesto to the fridge to wait for the other stages to be completed.

Brush the mushrooms with olive oil and roast them. They should lose all the excess fluid during the roasting so that they won't make the puff pastry soggy later. Peel the parsnip and chop it to small cubes. Then also brush the cubes with olive oil and also roast them for about 20 minutes at 150C with the mushrooms. After the roasting let the ingredients cool.

Spread the pesto on the mushrooms and place the parsnip cubes on the bottom side of the mushrooms and then the grated emmental. When you are assembling the parcels, you should take care that the parsnips stay put.

Roll out the puff pastry thinly. You can either wrap the mushrooms in the puff pastry or cut out round pieces. What I did this time, was to cut one larger circle and one slightly smaller, placed the mushroom with the bottom up on the larger circle and then closed the lid by placing the smaller lid on the top. Brush the edges of the pastry with beaten egg and finally brush the whole pastry with the egg. Repeat this for each portobello. I made a hedgehog shaped decoration with a cookie cutter of the puff pastry on the top. Decorations are optional, but will make a nice touch to the dish.

Then turn the mushrooms for baking on a greased baking tray or an oven dish and bake them at 180C for about 25 minutes until the pastry is fluffy and golden brown.

Serve the Wellingtons with other nice veggie Christmas dishes. I served them here with my Pomegranate and coquina squash salad.

Stay hungry!

Your VegHog