Bull Dusted Road Kill

The theory of “Bush Ingenuity” is legendary throughout our vast land and has been used to solve problems on the run by stockmen, drovers, miners and swaggies since the pioneering days. However there is no supernatural powers involved, nor any in-bred instinct born only to country people. It comes from not having the hardware store a few minutes down the road, or not having the money to visit the hardware store in the first place.

Often a solution or a substitute can be found right under your nose, it only takes a bit of imagination and some good old “Bush Ingenuity”. It’s like the inventions we have all seen and thought, now why didn’t I think of that?, it’s simplicity in it’s self. The inventor saw a problem and then went about solving it in the simplest way. Camp oven cooking can be aligned with the same principles, “keep it simple”. Along this line of thought, here is a recipe that is simple to make and uses what is at hand.

What you need

• Your left over meat from the Road Kill Roo Roast recipe, chopped into small bits
• Couple of tablespoons of oil
• Heaps of onions
• Big heaps of roughly chopped tomatoes, really ripe ones
• A couple of cloves of garlic chopped or crushed
• A fair dash of chilli sauce or chilli powder
• Worcestershire sauce 
• Plain flour

What you do

Get the floor of your camp oven really hot and add the oil, toss in the meat, garlic, chilli and onions and splash a bit of Worcestershire sauce over it then stir it all up until the meat is browned on the outside. Keep the oven hot and cooking fast, and add the tomatoes. Don’t put the lid on, you want to let some of the liquid from the tomatoes evaporate out so that the finished product is a thick tomato type sauce not a runny one.

Stir regularly, and when cooked if it is still a bit runny add some flour, premixed with the sauce in a cup to the pot and stir in until it is nice and thick. Keep the oven on the point of burning for the whole time and you will end up with a deliciously braised flavour that just can’t be imitated in any gourmet kitchen.

Tricks & Tips:

Tinned Tomatoes can be substituted if you don’t think fresh tomatoes are going to last the distance. This recipe is also really good using chops instead of roast meat. For that touch of “bush ingenuity” why not open a bottle of Australian red wine and add a splash to the recipe to impart that extra bit of flavouring? Don’t forget to save some for breakfast the next morning, it will be even better by then. The food, not the wine.

Rating

With the colour, texture and flavour reflecting the landscape of much of inland Australia, red, sun scorched and hot, you will be going back for more.

It doesn’t take much in the outback for an interesting story to become, myth, legend and folklore, even before it has come full circle. The bush telegraph was founded on Chinese whispers and communications broke down from there. A boss with a bad temper could be an axe murderer before the next job begins.