A Festive Dinner to Keep in Your Back Pocket

We always have a special dinner around December 30 to celebrate my sister-in-law’s birthday, and for a number of years I made my special double-the-meat double-the-cheese lasagna with cheesecake for dessert. Then I moved over to prime rib. This year, due to my being so impressed with the beef tenderloin served at our church’s Christmas dinner, I switched to that. I have to say that I’ll almost certainly never go back to prime rib. The tenderloin is cheaper (around $11.99/pound at Costco), cooks faster, and has wonderful flavor and tenderness. (The cook for the church dinner is named Aubrey Friedly, at Just One More Bite Catering CO.)

When you’re putting together an entire company dinner things can get a bit fraught. We had ten people coming, and I was doing everything except for the setup. So here’s what I made in addition to the roast beef, for which I’ll give the recipe below. Scroll down after the recipe to get an idea about the timetable for this dinner so that you can feel in control and not stress out too much.

Roasted Carrots and Shallots—I cut two pounds of regular carrots into fairly thin lengthwise sticks of 2-3 inches, and half a pound or so of shallots also into thinnish lengthwise slices, spreading them out on a rimmed baking sheet with several tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper. I roasted them for 45 minutes at 425 degrees, stirring them around several times. Another pound of carrots wouldn’t have hurt, as every scrap disappeared, and I’d also throw in some unpeeled garlic cloves that I’d then press into the mixture at the end. Any kind of orange vegetable (carrots, butternut squash, sweet potatoes) is well adapted to roasting. I like shallots for roasting better than I do onions, as they’re not as stringy and get very sweet. You want the veggies to get brown but not burned. (You could certainly use baby carrots for this, but you’ll need to cook them longer.)

Make-Ahead Mashed Potatoes—there are a million recipes for these out there; I peeled and boiled five pounds of Yukon Gold potatoes and threw in a stick of butter, some cream cheese, some sour cream, and some mascarpone, just using up the remnants of those last three ingredients. You could add some milk, half and half, or heavy cream to lighten things a bit. I salted the cooking water for the potatoes quite generously and so didn’t need any additional salt in the finished dish, although I did put in quite a bit of pepper. After I drained the potatoes and beat them until smooth with a hand mixer and then beat in the other ingredients I spread the potato mixture out in a greased 9×13 baking dish and baked it until it was good and hot and the top was lightly browned. The exact temp didn’t matter too much; I think I ended up putting it into the 350 degree oven. If you make this more than a couple of hours ahead you probably should refrigerate it, but you then need to let it warm up before you bake it.

Yorkshire Puddings—these weren’t very good, even though I followed a Smitten Kitchen recipe. They didn’t rise very well and were doughy in the middle. They were more like muffins than the popovers they’re supposed to be. So I’m not linking to the recipe. One of these days I’m going to conquer this item.

Salad—something very, very simple. I had bought some pomegranate seeds and just used some dressing I had on hand with lettuce and spinach. If I make salad with pomegranate seeds again I’ll try to get some pomegranate molasses and make a dressing that uses that. Salad was very much an afterthought.

Dessert was Chocolate Lava Cakes. Be sure to read my copious notes about unmolding these when you go to the recipe.

And the star of the show, the Beef Tenderloin with Mushrooms and Gravy. I got the idea from a cooking blog I love, HalfBakedHarvest, but that recipe called for using white wine, chicken stock and cream, and the more I thought about it the more I felt that the sauce didn’t work for beef. So I left out the cream and used red wine instead of white, with an option for beef stock rather than chicken. (You can take a look at her recipe here. and also see her lovely photographs. The picture on this post is just a stock photo; as I often say, this isn’t a food blog, and I’m not a photographer.)

Roasted Beef Tenderloin with Red-Wine Mushroom Sauce

You can make something truly celebratory and festive with this recipe without too much trouble and expense, although you do have to be willing to slice up lots of fresh mushrooms. 

Servings 10
Author Debi Simons

Ingredients

  • 1 5-pound beef tenderloin, * trimmed of any big fat globules
  • 2 tablespoons kosher salt
  • 1/4 cup olive oil, or as needed
  • 3 pounds** crimini mushrooms, although white button ones will also work
  • 2 cups red wine
  • freshly-ground pepper, a nice sprinkling
  • 1/4 cup flour
  • 4-6 cloves garlic, or to taste, pressed or minced***

Instructions

  1. Rub tenderloin all over with salt, let sit at room temp while you prep and cook the mushrooms, or at least an hour.

  2. Heat oven to 425.

  3. Rinse mushrooms and wipe clean, slice fairly thickly, then saute in olive oil over medium heat. Make sure you get the mushrooms cooked down so that there's little to no liquid in the pan. You'll probably need to do this in a couple of batches, depending on the size of your pan. Sprinkle generously with pepper and add the garlic and flour, stirring around to distribute evenly. Scrape the mixture into the bottom of the roasting pan you're going to use. Use some of the red wine to loosen any remaining flour/mushroom bits from the pan and scrape that in, too, then add the remaining wine. to the roasting pan. Put a rack over the mushrooms and place your tenderloin on that. You can also just put the meat on top of the mushrooms if you don't have a rack, but I think the meat cooks better if it's a little elevated and the bottom isn't poaching in liquid.

  4. I think the times given for roasting a piece of meat this size are too short. I don't want raw meat! I was very pleased with an internal temp of 135, which took about an hour. Be sure you're checking the temp in the very middle of the roast. The meat was good and pink, and very tender. You don't want to go beyond that temp, so start checking at around 45 minutes. You can always cook it longer, but you can't cook it shorter.

  5. Take the meat out of the roasting pan and put it on a cutting board, covering it with foil. I like to put it on the back of the stove if I can; my big cutting boards are made of plastic right now, though, so that isn't a good idea. Tuck it into the corner of your counter next to the stove and it should stay warm. 

  6. Make the gravy/sauce: Scrape down the sides of the roasting pan, getting all the mushrooms down from the sides, and add two cups of water. Put the pan over your biggest burner and bring the mixture to a boil, being sure to scrape up every last bit from the bottom. Then taste. You'll probably want to add some beef base just to give it a little extra flavor, but you won't need much. The mixture should be thick enough to be considered a gravy--remember, you added flour at the outset. Since a tenderloin is quite lean, you won't have too much fat in this gravy, so you won't have to do the horrible fat-skimming-at-the-last-minute routine.

  7. Pour the mushroom mixture into a bowl or gravy boat, slice the meat and put it on a platter or in a chafing dish pan, and serve. 

Recipe Notes

*I find Costco's meat to be excellent and a good price. Their beef tenderloins are more like 7-9 pounds, so I cut off part and froze it. Five pounds fit perfectly into my big roaster, and I made sure to include the thickest end. Ten people pretty well demolished this amount of meat, so if you're serving more people you could cut your roast in half and put the pieces side-by-side on your rack, turning them around the other way midway through, although that would be quite an operation. Or you could cook the extra meat in a separate pan, maybe one of those disposable ones, putting it in the oven 15 minutes after the original pan goes in. 

**I say to use three pounds of mushrooms because I just bought two of the 24-ounce packages at Costco. In reality, you almost can't have too many mushrooms. If I had realized how much people would love the mushrooms/sauce I'd have bought a third package. Yes, prep takes awhile, but they're so good, and the rest of this recipe is so simple, that it's totally worth it.

***I'm including the "minced" option because not everyone has a garlic press, but honestly, folks! Just get one and use it! I got very, very tickled by this Pinch of Yum post which goes into great detail about how to peel garlic and implies that you'll then mince it, but at the end of the post they list a garlic press as one of their favorite tools, and if you use a press you don't have to peel the garlic. To quote the comment I posted on that site (and never got a reply): "Just use your paring knife to cut off the hard top of the clove and pull down/off a strip of the peel, put the clove peeled side down into the press, and . . . press. You do have to clean out the press after each clove or two, but that’s pretty easy. If you want a big batch of roasted garlic, then of course you don’t peel it until afterwards, when you just squish out the roasted garlic between your fingers."

Some ideas on a timetable:

I’m very fortunate to have a double oven; that is, not two separate ovens but a stove with two ovens built in. It is so, so great, with a larger oven of about 2/3 of the space and then a smaller one below. It’s a Kenmore Elite Electric Combination Oven with a list price of well over $4,000 which we got for about $1,000 at a scratch-and-dent Sears Outlet Store which has since closed. I also have access to my mother-in-law’s oven upstairs, although I didn’t use it for this meal. Anyway, you’re probably not in the market for a new stove right now, so I’d encourage you to think through how you’re going to shuffle things in and out of your (probably) single oven. You can roast the vegetables while the meat is cooking, since they don’t have to be screaming hot to be good. You can then slide in the mashed-potato casserole and the Yorkshire puddings (if making) after the meat comes out of the oven, which should give those two dishes enough time. Gravy is made on the stovetop, of course. Then set your oven to 450 degrees as you sit down to eat, preferably with a delayed start (an option that most even not-so-new stoves have) so that you can bake the Chocolate Lava Cakes at the last minute. Everything for this menu can be prepped ahead except for the last-minute gravy-making steps. I’ve learned over the years that flying by the seat of my pants for a big dinner is not the way to go. Over at America’s Test Kitchen Julia Collin-Davison and Jack Butler both talked on a recent holiday special about having a schedule–Julia’s was hour-by-hour, but Jack had his plan down to half hours. It may seem like a lot of work to do this pre-planning, but really it takes only a few minutes so sit down and say to yourself, ‘Okay, what am I doing when?’ and writing it down. I’ve mentioned my friend Wendi back at our old church in Washington D.C. who was the big-event queen and who always had a typed-out schedule. As the time for your guests to arrive gets closer and closer you’ll be so glad to have that list!

Also, if you’re having more than six people, I’d encourage you to at least consider using a separate serving table with serving items that allow you to keep food hot. I use inexpensive chafing dishes and an electric warming tray. (Amazon Affiliate links) It’s so sad to have lukewarm gravy! Once you put your food in place you don’t have to worry about its getting cold.

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