Barbecued steaks with anchovy butter and potato salad

Plated up! 

For this meal, we had my Father-in-law (FiL) join us. My FiL has the philosophy that dinner is not dinner, until it has potatoes, so this was a great recipe to do last night.

(By the way, the foodie members of the family are slowing beginning to teach him that potatoes don't need to be eaten everyday!)

As you can see from the picture above, plated up this meal looks amazing, and it went very well with a drop of Chris Ringland Shiraz.

There were no leftovers from this meal - we only cooked steak for the three of us, and with FiL in the house, the potato salad had no chance to make it to another day.

Substitutions / Omissions / Deletions:

We tend to find that steak is a very personal thing - so as I mentioned on the menu post, rather than just purchase the steak in the recipe, both my partner and I had the sort of steaks we prefer. Yesterday morning my partner grabbed two steaks out of the freezer for him and his Dad.

We did buy the Kalamata olives, but didn't use them in the salad. I am not an olive person, and I think my partner thought the flavour might be a bit too strong for my FiL - who having been told we were going to have steaks and potato salad for dinner might have been disappointed if the potato salad was to far from the traditional fare. The olive will probably get used with some sort of cheese or antipasto plate over the long weekend.

We also don't buy tinned anchovies, but the fluffy white fillets pictured below. These have a more delicate fishy flavour, rather than being overly salty, and are not in the slightest bit furry!

Prep tips:

The onion were chopped up in 3mm thick rings on the mandolin slicer. Rather than crush the garlic, it was finely diced using our Tupperware turbo chef. As it was rather late by the time we got around to cooking the steaks, they were done on the cast iron stove top grill, rather then the BBQ. The lemon was juiced using the hand-held lever citrus juicer.

Things to do differently next time:

The anchovy butter wasn't really anchovy-ie, but had more of a mildly salty taste. This was probably due to using the fillets, so if we did this again, we would probably use more anchovy fillets to give the butter a little more 'pow'. I'd also love to try the red wine butter that is listed at the bottom of the recipe as an alternative.

Summary:
Taste - It is really hard to go wrong with steak! (Well, when you don't have vegetarian guests...) The anchovy butter was a great accompaniment to the meat, and still had lots of garlic and lemon flavour. The salad was a lovely alternative to traditional creamy potato salads. The red onion soaked in red wine vinegar was delicious - I have a feeling we may be doing this for other salads with onion. The potatoes were still slightly warm when I was eating them - which made them that little bit more nomable. As I said before - there were no leftovers, so the meal was good!
Ease - This was a fairly easy meal to throw together. Again, the gadgets made quick work of prepping the salad ingredients, and my partner would happily live on steak and can cook it to perfection.
Time - Timing for the meal is a little difficult to judge - I did half of the prep, and then had to run out to the supermarket to grab some things for dessert, so my partner finished it off. Also, we like to eat our steak rare, which means more time out of the fridge before we cook it (you need to get it up to room temperature before putting it on the grill so it's not cold inside when you eat it.) Because I was out at the supermarket, my partner didn't start cooking the steaks until I got back, which also meant the onion had longer to sulk in the vinegar, most likely making them taste so good. If I had to guess, I'd probably say we took a bit longer than 15 minutes to prep, but it wouldn't have been much longer than that.

Would I make it again? 
For sure! This is a pretty easy meal to adapt to personal taste which makes it a winner. I'd probably make the salad by itself for BBQs and picnics, as it would be something a little different and is not difficult to make.