Herby Goes To Mornington

Good morning Bloggers & Blogettes,
Monday again, groan. Where does the weekend go? It seemed like we spent the whole time driving around the Peninsula in preparation for Saturday's cookup. We'd flagged a rather full-on recipe in November's Gourmet Traveller mag, now on shelf at your fave CCLC library! :o) It's Cured Beef Fillet with a Herb Crust and we served it with a platter of crisp veggies with two sauces. Both these recipes are on page 136. [We did, however, substitute the zucchini flowers and baby fennel with celery and green and butter beans.]
Talk about culinary dedication! We drove to Mt. Martha to visit Phil, our butcher extraordinaire at Bell's Gourmet Meats, who plied us with a choice King Island beef fillet, and popped into the greengrocers for fresh flat leaf parsley, oregano, dill and taragon, coming out somewhat bereft with only the parsley in hand. This necessitated a visit to Tully's, the fruit and veggie coolstore in Moorooduc which I've mentioned before, and after much consultation and $30 later, came out with a trolley full of herbs and fresh vegetables. We then headed off to Safeways back in Mornington for the more boring daily necessities, but could not get any creme fraiche, the base of one of the dipping sauces. So we then drove around to the Coles supermarket (up near the Beleura Hill end of Mornington) and picked that up. Then back to Joey the Bottleshop Dude for a rather good Peninsula Pinot Noir, and finally, after nearly three hours, headed back home!
This recipe was very labour intensive, and I felt like I was chained to the kitchen all weekend, which is not a good thing. However, there was some distraction - we have Kookaburras nesting in a large palm tree next door, and watching them and listening to that iconic Kooka laughter was very entertaining.
I won't bore the eyeballs out of you with what you have to do to get 'cured beef'; it involves a lot of rock salt/caster sugar/white wine etc. and 6 hours in the fridge before 'un-salting, un-sugaring and un-wining' and ready for cooking, and after the oven cooking is when you start 'herbing' and re-covering for a further 2 hours in the fridge! The two sauces required a lot of mixing and blending in the food processor, and then there was the veggie preparation and blanching and drying, and pffffff, it just went on and on and on.
But, I hear the Bloggy cry, was it worth it? In a word, NO. It wasn't disappointing, it was just ... hmmm, a bit too salty, a bit too taragon-y, and the garlic and anchovy sauce had too much lemon in it. Ho hum, we can tick that one off the list. Glory only knows how we're gonna get through all the herbs in the fridge. I'll have to freeze them I think. Methinks next Saturday BJ can don the chef's apron and fire up something on the barbie. I'm going to put my feet up!