Kazza the Blank One

On Thursday night, Neil and I went along to the annual Brokenwood Wine dinner.

This year it was at the Monster Kitchen and Bar in Hotel Hotel in New Acton.

This was the entree of Mooloolaba Bug Tails.  Quite a few elements, although not a lot of actual bug tails.  Good textures and flavours, quite nice.

Mains was liquorice cured duck breast and boudin noir.  I don't like liquorice but I was pleasantly surprised to not really taste it.  Boudin noir is essentially a black pudding.  I found the duck went very nicely with the pinot noir, and the blood sausage went better with the shiraz.  The duck was lovely and the crunchiness of the nuts gave this dish a great texture.

Dessert was a mixed plate of "soft chocolate, mandarin, almond, rosemary".  The soft chocolate was a little bar of chocolate pudding.  The mandarin was actual pieces of mandarin.  There were biscuity bits and other crunchy stuff to give it great texture.  The rosemary seemed to be in the ice cream.  Overall I think this was probably my favourite dish.  It was paired with a sweet "Sticky Wicket" semillon, which a lot of other people didn't finish.

So overall a lovely meal, but I think there could have been a bit more food.  I didn't end up full, and I'm not even a big eater.  I can imagine hungry guys would still be hungry afterwards.  And because it was only three courses it meant there were two white wines to go with entree and two reds to go with mains.  I would have preferred more but smaller courses so you only had to worry about one wine per course.

But, the food was nice and we had enough wine to keep us pleasantly happy without getting too silly :)