Aussie Rules

The Larder were putting on a dégustation as part of Wellington On A Plate, titled Aussie Rules. Guess what? It’s all based on Aussie food…and I don’t just mean a pie floater! We went along on Wednesday night to give it a try. Here’s the menu:

First up we were served homemade bread with vegemite butter, then the first course, predictably made from crocodile meat, was a kind of croc croquette in a leek soup. I see what you’ve done there! Crocodile, for those who haven’t tried it, is a fairly bland meat, so the crispy coating and seasoning helped it along. This was accompanied by a Pewsey Vale Riesling.

Second course was prawns on the barbie – grilled banana prawns with a lemon garlic aioli, and served with Vasse Felix chardonnay.

Onto the main courses, and first was a delicious fillet of emu, cooked rare and served with an onion puree. This was named after Edward and Edwina – a children’s book series about (you guessed it!) two emus. The wine accompaniment was a Rockbare grenache/shiraz/mouvedre from McClaren Vale – quite a strong tannin, with blackberry flavours.

The final red meat was, of course, roo – named Skippy after the iconic star of the television programme from the sixties. This was served with another shiraz, this one from Mojo in the Barossa Valley. I tasted this before eating any of the kangaroo – it was quite strong on the tannins, and the fruit flavours underneath. After eating the pepper-crusted roo, however, the taste was completely different – with the tannin neutralised, the fruit flavours of the wine were much more evident with cherry, toffee and vanilla in the mix.

For pudding we had  a chocolate mousse of the Paris Hilton variety (thick and rich) in the shape of Uluru, and accompanied with a  chocolate wafer, wattleseed ice cream and macadamia nuts. A glass of Penfolds father grand port completed the wine matches.

What can I say? As always with The Larder, it was delicious. The portions were well-controlled as well, so we weren’t stuffed when we came out (unlike some others I could mention), which was just as well as we’d left the car at home and were walking up the hill.

On the way out we stopped for a quick chat with Jacob and Sarah, and also booked ourselves a table for the weekend to try their Bug Burger entry in the Burger Wellington competition. More on that later.