Rolled steak with roasted potatoes

Zack had actually made dinner last night. He pretty much sticks to the same dishes, one of which is beef or chicken stir-fry with rice. He usually uses green or red peppers, mushrooms and onions for the vegetables. So, we had some mushrooms and beef left over from last night. I didn't feel like going out because of the unusually(?) chilly weather today. I decided I can make rolled steak with those left over ingredients.

I based my steak creation on this Everyday Food recipe. I substituted the roasted peppers with mushrooms, the scallions with shallot, the balsamic vinegar with red wine vinegar and the mozzarella cheese with Muenster cheese. Yeah, I pretty much changed every ingredient because I happened to have those ingredients and not the ones in the recipe. According to the Food Network encyclopedia, the kind of Muenster cheese I used is the bland American version. I'm not the biggest fan, but somehow it found its way in my fridge. As for the vinegar, I actually have some balsamic vinegar in the pantry but there was a strange waxy layer that had formed right above the liquid in the bottle. After I jabbed it with the end of my cooking chopsticks, it fell into the vinegar. I thought it tasted a little funny so I was afraid to use it in the dish. Does anyone have a clue what this is?

I also cooked some roasted potatoes with olive oil, fresh thyme and a couple of whole, unpeeled garlic cloves. I got this easy recipe from Mario Batali's latest cookbook Molto Italiano but have seen variations elsewhere. I normally use the dried rosemary called for in the recipe but I used thyme instead since I have it around. I actually liked this better than the rosemary version.

I love how the potatoes are crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. It's so absolutely delicious that I have to keep going back for more.

As you can see, the steak is well done after I cooked it for about 25 minutes. I probably could have stopped cooking it at 15 or 20 minutes to retain a little bit of the pinkness in the meat. In the oven, the cheese was oozing out from inside the rolled steak and giving off a lot of smoke as it melted and burned on to the baking sheet. Don't worry! The steak turned out great!

I was pretty satisfied with how this steak turned out and even more ecstatic when Zack was commenting on how good it was. He said he could eat eight pounds of it and looked like he was about to cry when I told him there isn't anymore left for him to get seconds.