Flat Iron Steak And Potatoes

Excellent meal tonight. And of course I'll be sharing it all with you. First, the 'taters.

I thinly sliced two red potatoes since that's what I had. You can use whatever potato you may have. Just slice them as thinly as possible.

I poured olive oil on my baking sheet (You could use either Extra Virgin or Extra Light.) and slid my potato slices around, then brushed the tops with the excess oil.

Sage on one half of the taters. Rosemary on the other half. I flove having my herb garden.

Add some freshly ground salt and pepper and dot with butter for extra goodness and flavor. The potatoes went into a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes, then I upped the temp to 450 degrees, cooked for 10 more minutes, then turned the slices over and cooked for another 10 minutes,

until nice and crisp and brown. Blot with paper towels.

Here's the flat iron steak, which I've only recently started seeing in the meat section. It's one of the most flavorful cuts I've had. It comes from the cow's shoulder, which is surprising to me, since it's quite a tender cut. We just season it with freshly ground salt and pepper and my new favorite seasoning - Montreal Steak Seasoning. (Check out their web site on the above link. It has "FLAVOR You Can See!") Let the steak come to room temperature before grilling. I always let meat come to room temp before cooking. And I don't know why. I Googled it today (And WHY ON EARTH does the spell check highlight freakin' GOOGLE?????) Anyways, about googling room temp meats. The same site said NEVERNEVERNEVER let meat get to room temp. It will immediately become rancid and if you eat it you'll die a horrible death. And on the same page, I read, "Let the meat come to room temperature. It makes the meat more tender."

Here are the potatoes at the halfway mark. Turn over and keep baking until they're all nicely browned and crisp.

Mr. Hawthorne grilled the steak perfectly, maybe 8 minutes total. One end of the steak was a little thicker than the other end, so he put that on the hotter section of the grill.

We don't boil our corn anymore. We cut off the ends and leave the husks on and nuke them: 2 minutes for 1 ear, 3 minutes for 2 ears, 4 minutes for 3 ears.

Lovely rare flat iron steak.

Crunchy, crisp potato chips

with the occasional flavors of sage and rosemary.

Here's my dinner: rare, extremely tender and flavorful steak, herbed, crunchy potato chips, sweet, buttery corn. There was only one thing wrong with this meal. I wanted a steak sandwich for lunch today and there was no leftover meat. Nada. Nor potatoes. Sooooo, when Daughter Hawthorne called at 2:21 this afternoon on her way home from last night's outing to get ready to be at work by 4:00 to ask me if there was coffee ready and was there any food and she didn't have time to take Giada for a walk because she had been really tired and was sleeping all that time, YadaYadaYada, I went ahead and put on a pot of coffee and toasted my Arnold's 100% Whole Wheat Sandwhich Thins, fried up a couple of bacon slices, sliced a tomato, added some lettuce, some thinly sliced pieces of the one and only chicken breast leftover from the other night with my bastardized version of the Alinea marinade, and made a special sandwich for Daughter Hawthorne.

Here's Dearest Daughter's Sandwich (And, yes, Sandwich should be capitalized.) Look at the texture of the chicken. That's what the marinade did. It's a smooth, clean, cohesive texture. The marinade had permeated the meat and I could taste every flavor in there: the citrus the fresh, raw coriander seeds with their magnificent pop between your teeth and in-your-face burst of greenness and cilantro the soy the ginger ... I wish somebody would make me a sammich.