Outback Steakhouse {Joplin, MO}

If there’s one thing I can tell you about myself, I was born on my grandma’s 51st birthday. Yup, she got to spend that birthday in the hospital waiting on me to come… Fun, right? Well it has been fun and one of the great things is we get to celebrate our birthday’s together.

This year I called her up and asked her if she had plans, my grandma is a busy lady! She told me no, she was waiting on my phone call because everyone knows we go to dinner together for our birthdays. We debated where we were going to go, and I mentioned that my mom is kicking butt losing weight so we chose a restaurant where mom could eat easily… Outback Steakhouse.

This year I went for the Chopped steak medium rare with a truffle oil sauce and mushrooms. For my sides I had a salad with Ranch and Steak House Mac & Cheese.

I need to first tell you that I LOVE OUTBACK’S SALADS. Is that crazy? I think it is… but their croutons are out of this world and the ranch dressing and cheese… Yum, that’s what makes the salad there. Just saying.

The steak was ok. I wasn’t as impressed with it as I thought I would be. It was cooked perfectly and the gravy with mushrooms was good, but being a New item on the menu I had higher hopes for it.

The Steakhouse Mac and Cheese on the other hand, I could have had a second helping of that. I tried just their regular mac and cheese and it was bland, but the seasonings that were added to this mac and cheese made this dish dynamic in taste. Oh yum. I was like licking the bowl clean… ok maybe not licking but i was using the regular Mac and cheese to sop up what was left of the seasonings of the other! It was that good.

Finally, the told our waiter that it was my grandma and my birthday. He told us to pick out a dessert on the menu. I went with the Chocolate Thunder from Down Under. It’s a pecan brownie with chocolate drizzle, a nice helping of vanilla ice cream, cool whip and chocolate shavings. This was very good. I’m not a huge nut in dessert type person so I could have done without the pecans, but it was still so darn good I didn’t mind.

So this particular experience we had both my daughters. We actually had a larger group, there were 7 of us total. Our 2 girls had to wait for their food and my youngest wasn’t having it. We didn’t complain though, we just kept her occupied with steak. When one of the managers brought out our food, he said he was going to comp my youngests food on our bill and apologized profusely. We didn’t ask and didn’t say a word, but that was sure nice of them.

*Pulled from my old blog Paved Dirt Roads