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Meat Review – The Bootlegger Bar

As I mentioned when reviewing the E-I-E-I-O burger, I love a meal where there is more than one meat contained within the dish. And on a recent visit to Katoomba NSW I discovered a restaurant-slash-bar that had on its menu a dish that contained not two meats or three but indeed four!

So lets have a gander at the Bootleggers Meat Share Plate.

A meal made in Trev-heaven!

So the description of the meal is a Share Plate and it is indeed intended for two people. Given it was our anniversary I relented and shared this plate with my wife, but being the kind woman she is she let me devour the lions portion of it.

The meal comes with four meats from two different animals. Beef brisket and links (sausages) and chicken wings as well as fried chicken. Personally I would have preferred the links be made out of pork but you can’t have everything.

Along with the above came enough non-meat foods to ensure that you would have some chance of being able to pass your next bowel movement. Slaw, Corn, Pickles, Potato Salad and Chips. Good to see that at least 40% of the sides were spud based – potatoes being that good that they should almost be considered an honorary meat!

Unto the breach!

The meats were all very tender. The fried chicken was done very well, not remotely oily or greasy like that one would get from a fast food restaurant. The chicken wings were lightly spiced so not as hot as buffalo wings but at least had a bit of bite to them. The brisket was very tender as brisket should be. The only meat that didn’t impress me was the links. They weren’t bad in any way, but just your average beef sausages so were somewhat overshadowed by the rest.

The non-meat stuff was good too. I think. I dunno, I wasn’t really paying attention.

 

Exploding Hot Sauce!

Sauce made by chef Wile. E. Coyote

The waitress brought out two types of hot sauce, espousing their virtues about how they were made on site, not simply store bought. As readers of my blog would know I love hot sauces so was eager to try them out. The red hot sauce was indeed very hot, not as hot as the likes of Mad Dog 357, but still had a helluva kick. The green sauce? Well I went to open it…

…and it exploded!

Perhaps exploded is not the right term. The heat had built up in the bottle so as soon as the top was twisted it made a sound like shook up cola can and the sauce blew forth! It covered my shirt, splattered my face and even left a sorta Trev-shaped splatter pattern on the window behind me.

The poor young waitress was very apologetic. After ascertaining that it had not gone in my eyes she brought multiple wet paper towels for me to clean myself, then later appeared with a shirt from the restaurants merchandise stash for me to wear home. So sadly, unless I had chosen to lick my clothing I never got to sample what the green hot sauce tasted like.

The shirt I wear when doing my radio show, though my music isn’t bootlegged – the CD’s are just really worn

 

Overall

This meal is nearly $80 but its certainly enough for two people (as long as one isn’t me) and its very good tasting. Besides the volatile hot sauces the only other accompaniment was a small bowl of BBQ sauce – personally I would have preferred to get a hearty gravy but perhaps that would push the meal into the realms of making a coronary a certainty. The bar had a different selection of wheat beers on tap which were quite nice, but if you’d take my recommendation skip the ginger based beer, it was pretty average.   So yeah, do yourself a favour and if in Katoomba drop past Bootleggers – you will get a decent feed and maybe a free shirt!

 

Related Articles:

Meat Review: Pepino’s Mexican Restaurant

Meat Review: The Kings Hotel

Meat Review: Cactus Jam

Meat Recipe #5 – Mum’s Oven-cooked T-Bone Steak & Onions with Mushroom Gravy

International Women’s Day. A day to celebrate women everywhere.  There have been three main women in my life – my mother, my wife and my daughter (an honorable mention to my older sister but I will be using my love for her to discuss a different recipe).  I cannot express enough the depth of my love for these wonderful women.  So on International Women’s Day I do my best to honor the three of them.  I do this by cooking, in memory of my mother, the dish she would always cook for me whenever I came home to visit as she knew I loved it so much!  I’ve carried this on by cooking it for my wife and daughter.  Though it is not the most ‘feminine’ meal, it always reminds me of my mum and it satiates my 2-year old’s craving for meat as well as my wife’s enjoyment of not having to cook after a long day at work.  So let me share with you Big Angry Trev’s mothers recipe for ‘Oven-cooked T-Bone Steak & Onions with Mashed Potatoes and Mushroom Gravy.

Ingredients:

2 x 400gm T-Bone Steaks

4 x Large Potatoes

1 x Large Onion, diced

1 ½ x Tablespoons of Gravy mix powder

1 x 165gm can of Sliced Mushroom in Butter Sauce

½ cup x Full Cream Milk

1/3 cup x Grated Cheddar Cheese

25gm of Butter

Handful of Beans

Handful of Broccoli

Diced Carrot and Corn

Cooking Oil

Salt

Water

 

Method

Step 1:

  • Remove steak from fridge and coat with salt and oil 20 minutes before cooking
  • Preheat oven to 200 degrees
  • Boil 2 pots of water
  • Peel potatoes
  • Chop up remaining vegetables

Step 2:

  • Put steaks on shallow oven dish and place in oven
  • Put potatoes on to boil
  • Mix up jug of gravy powder and water

Step 3:

  • After 15 minutes take steaks out of oven. Drain excess fat.  Flip steaks and cover with diced onion then place back in oven
  • Put beans, broccoli, carrot and corn on to boil in second pot

Step 4:

  • Take potatoes off the boil. Mix with butter, cheese and milk and mash thoroughly
  • Put gravy mixture on to heat until boiling. When boiling add can of mushroom sauce, mix thoroughly and simmer on low for two minutes

Step 5:

  • Remove steaks from oven when onion has browned
  • Take vegetables off boil and drain
  • Place steak & onions, vegetables & mashed potato on plate
  • Fill gravy boat with mushroom gravy.

 

And there you have it.  I have many very fond memories of my mother cooking this for me and I know it always brought a smile to her face to see how much her grown-up son enjoyed it whenever he came home to visit.  I now do my best to recapture that magic by cooking it for my own family and if my mother is up above somewhere I hope she thinks I am doing her recipe justice.  I hope this recipe can bring you some fond family memories as well.

 

Got a similar recipe?  Would love to read it in the comments section below!