Friday, August 15, 2008

How Saucy!

The other day I had a craving.

Across the road from work there's this steak place that has a reputation for doing the best steaks in Melbourne. We've been there a couple of times for business lunches, and I have to say the reputation is well-earned. But what I like even more than the steak, what I often find myself with a desperate craving for, is the garlic sauce that you can order there.



Oh God! This sauce! It's so delicious!

Every now and then I get a distinct hankering for it. The problem is that this steak place isn't cheap, so it's not something that can go on the menu all that often.

On Wednesday I started wondering what it'd take to make that garlic sauce. I figured it would be pretty simple; garlic, thickened cream, and butter. But surely it'd be more complicated than that!

Getting home from work early, I found myself in the very rare mood to cook. I headed down to the local supermarket to get my ingredients. Luckily, there was a beautiful cut of rump steak waiting for me, which is very rare given how crappy the meat section in this market tends to be.

I picked out my cream, got some lettuce and olives to make a salad as well as crinkle-cut chips for a side dish, and headed home.

I poured the cream into a bowl and added minced garlic, thinking all I'd do was zap it in the microwave. Oh, poor, sweet fool! It quickly became evident that all this would result in was garlic-flavoured cream. Not all that appetizing.

I started up the stove as I stuck the chips in the oven to see if I could salvage the sauce. A good deal of heat, stirring, extra scoops of cream, butter and garlic later, and VOILA! I had a sauce that, while it wasn't EXACTLY like the stuff I craved, was pretty damn close!

I thought about taking a picture of the end result (including the picturesque salad with raspberry salad dressing!) but I couldn't hold out with how much my mouth was watering. So just imagine something like this with a hearty side helping of greens (I forgot to mention the blue cheese-stuffed olives I included in the salad .... mmmmmmm!).

All in all, it made for a pretty damn good Wednesday night meal, and because I started making it so early, I had eaten and washed up all the dishes by about 7.15. This rep life has a lot going for it!

I'm thinking I'm going to try to experiment with making more sauces, but I don't know if I'll be able to avoid making the garlic sauce as much as I possibly can.

God, I want some more right now!!

No comments: