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Shiraz undaunted by strong flavours.

Eye fillet with garlic butter.

Slice two inches off a 250 gram stick of butter. Allow it to soften but not melt. (Not difficult in this climate: at the time of writing it was 32 degrees outside (we’ve gone from Fahrenheit to Celsius in two posts) with black clouds and storms approaching the city). Assist the softening process if necessary by cutting into smaller cubes.

Chop a sprig of parsley as finely as you can including the fine stalk. One way to do this is by placing it in a glass and chopping it with scissors. This works surprisingly well.

Peel four cloves of garlic and chop them as finely as possible. Combine the butter, parsley and garlic: best done with a fork, in a cup. Add salt and cracked pepper to taste. (Vary the relativities in this mixture depending on your preferred garlic Beaufort Scale.) Transfer to a piece of aluminium foil, roll up and shape into a cylinder. Refrigerate.

Meanwhile peel, chop and boil four large potatoes; trim twenty green beans. If you are not busy enough, throw together a salad of lettuce, halved cherry tomatoes, fetta cheese, pitted kalamata olives, a pinch of dried oregano and a splash of olive oil. Open a bottle of wine. Last night it happened to be Mount Alexander Shiraz 2008 but you won't find it at Dan Murphy's or that ridiculous bottle shop whose logo is a camel. Seriously, marketing departments have lost the plot.

Heat and oil heavy pan. Grill steaks – eye fillet it happened to be, two inches thick; but porterhouse or Scotch fillet will suffice – to preferred doneness.

While steak is grilling, drain potatoes, reserving some water in which to boil the beans for a couple of minutes - and beat with enough milk to achieve a creamy mash. Add salt and pepper and a sprinkling of sheared parsley.

Place a coin-thick – or thicker - slice from the hardened cylinder of garlic butter on the steak next to a small mountain of mash on plate. Beans on the side. See if you can resist adding extra garlic butter to the mound of creamy mash. It’s almost impossible. Just make a dent in the top and pile it on.

Pour a glass of shiraz, if you have not already done. Profoundly inky with a flavour as deep as the ocean, it cuts through that butter beautifully and is not frightened by the garlic; truly a sea dark wine.

Comments

  1. Absolutely delish!!

    I love a good steak with flavoured butter, especially garlic and herb. Can't handle the shiraz though, red just doesn't like me so it has to be a white. Them's the breaks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I really like some of your posts…will bookmark your blog.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Melbourne Girl, I used to be a white drinker but I've changed to red since they took the backbone out of chardonnay.

    Thank you, Neilesh.

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