This is perhaps one of my greatest culinary achievements. I did this in Melbourne during my last day there. I wanted to cook a full course dinner with kangaroo roast as the flagship for my loved one and here’s the recipe for everything!
I bought everything at Coles Express in Melbourne CBD.
The grocery shopping bill came out to AUD 70.19 (about RM 221) so that’s how much it costs.
There are five (5) courses to the dinner:
Italian Salad with Fresh Garden Greens and Honey Balsamic Dressing
This is the starter (of sorts) – gotta have foliage in the diet.
Roasted Stuffed Chicken with Gravy
I’ll call this the appetizer since that was how we ate it.
Sixthseal’s Seafood Supreme (TM) with cream, white wine and garlic – prawns, Tasmanian mussels, bacon, cheese, exotic mushrooms and macadamia nuts with traditional bread
This is the best dish I came out with, according to Ling, and I’m quite proud of myself. It tastes really great! I think it deserves that (TM) bit. 😉
Herb & Garlic Kangaroo Roast
This is the main dish – the one I slaved over for hours, coz I wanted her to try kangaroo meat.
Kiwiberries + Raspberries with Caramel and White Chocolate sauce
I’m quite proud of this dessert too!
That’s the menu for the night and I started out by preparing the salad.
Italian Salad with Fresh Garden Greens
It’s a bit of a cheat since it came in a ready made bag but I can’t cook everything from scratch. Haha! Even the sauce came in a miniature bottle that was right beside the salad. It’s “sweet, crisp leaves balanced with shredded radicchio and a hint or aromatic parsley”.
I just put the entire contents of the bag into a salad bowl and poured in the 125 ml honey balsamic dressing. It’s store brand but quite good. Ling actually ate a lot of this.
I didn’t.
Roasted Stuffed Chicken with Gravy
This is her suggestion coz she thought I’ll take a long time with the kangaroo roast. She was right. We bought 1/2 a stuffed chicken. It comes in a bag and you just need to chuck the bag into the oven and heat it up.
The bag works to keep the moisture in. I kept the bag to use for my kangaroo roast too.
It’s pretty good since you can’t very well go wrong with a pre-cooked item from Coles. The stuffing was salty, the meat was tender and it’s delicious coz we were so hungry at that point. I was still slaving over the kangaroo roast at this point.
Sixthseal’s Seafood Supreme (TM) with cream, white wine and garlic – prawns, Tasmanian mussels, bacon, cheese, exotic mushrooms and macadamia nuts with traditional bread
My proudest dish! I must tell the entirety of this story.
We bought garlic marinated prawns from Coles – it comes in a package so we didn’t need any other sauces. We were just there for a day and didn’t want to buy large bottles of seasoning.
I also went to the meat counter and got a rasher of bacon. It’s huge! The bacon measures 1 1/2 feet long and several inches wide – there’s a photo of me holding it later. I wanted the rinds to cook with.
Macadamia nuts were from the raw produce section. It’s raw nuts at AUD 33.98 / kg. That makes it AUD 7.56 (RM 25) for the handful of a few nuts I grabbed! I calculated, that’s RM 1.30 per nut. 😡
The mushrooms came in a pack that that was labelled 3 gourmet mushrooms – there are two familiar ones (they aren’t “exotic” to Asians) but the orange fungi is new to me.
I went to the cheese counter and chose bocconcini – a mild mozarella type cheese that you keep submerged in liquid. It would be really hard to find this here but I ate bocconcini for fun as a snack when I was studying in Melbourne.
The best thing we saw was the Tasmanian mussels!
It was marked down to just AUD 0.50! That’s a 92% discount! It was such a good bargain that I wanted it for my seafood bonanza. It’s the best buy of the trip – there’s always price cuts but this just takes the cake.
The traditional bread is supposed to go with this dish to wipe up the creamy gravy (and also to go with the kangaroo roast). There are no preservatives and it’s very good bread – artisan bread handmade using kibbled wheat. AUD 5.50 (RM 17). It’s not cheap, this 800 gram loaf of traditional bread.
The ingredients!
I sliced up the bacon rinds and fried it for a bit before dumping in the rest of the bacon.
I then added in the mussels with all the cream, garlic and white wine marinate…
…and then the prawns with it’s own garlic marinade.
Awesome stuff!
A wonderful smell was starting to waft out and this was when I threw the raw macadamis nuts in.
Added the mushrooms and cheese last and let it simmer for a bit.
It’s delicious! I cooked a mess…
…but Ling plated it so nicely it could be a restaurant dish!
Ta da!
It tasted wonderful – sweet and salty, with lots of seafood and delicious liquids for the traditional bread to soak up.
Herb & Garlic Kangaroo Roast
I had a lot of trouble with this. I set the oven wrongly and the bag nearly caught on fire (which has the potential to trip the fire alarm, causing a huge fine).
Luckily, she smelled something burning and I sorted it out.
I wouldn’t want to go through the arduous process, but it was 3 am when this was finally ready.
It’s worth the time and the blood, sweat and tears I put in though – it’s cooked to perfection!
Ling tried it and had several more pieces, she said it tasted like liver. Oh well, at least she’s tried kangaroo meat now.
I liked it – I ate quite a fair bit of the kangaroo roast. It’s gamey and flavorful, with chewy meat. I’m glad we didn’t cop out and go for kangaroo burger patties or kangaroo steaks – a kangaroo roast is the proper way to eat kangaroo meat. Lovely stuff!
Kiwiberries + Raspberries with Caramel and White Chocolate sauce
This is the dessert I made for her – kiwiberry is a small fruit that looks like mini kiwifruit and tastes like kiwifruit but it’s much sweeter. You can just pop it into your mouth to eat it without peeling anything.
The raspberries are fresher too and I mixed both fruits into a glass (don’t have a parfait server).
I had two dips of caramel and white chocolate and I spooned each in turn into the fruit mixture to create contrasting textures.
It was so good we finished the fruits the next day by dipping it straight into the leftover caramel and white chocolate dip. 🙂
I had fun cooking for her. It’s a nice change, and it’s kind of her to rinse the plates before I loaded the dishwasher coz I was bushed by then. She got to eat kangaroo meat and it was an awesome way to spend the last night in Melbourne together. It’s a lovely end to a wonderful trip!
