Beef and Cucumber Salad - Aug 4, 2011

Nick and I hardly ever prepare beef at home, and when we do it's almost always hamburgers. For a special treat, I picked up a 100% grass-fed flank steak at the co-op last week. I choose a small one, but we still got two meals out of it. The first you see above. To prepare the steak, I rubbed it with salt and pepper and threw it on a hot cast-iron grill pan. I could have done it on an actual grill, but was lazy and decided that I didn't want to pull the whole thing out for one little flank steak. I cooked, flipping once, until the meat was medium rare (that was a lucky guess, but it turned out perfectly). While the steak was 'resting,' I made up a little salad dressing using tamari, lemon juice (only because we were fresh out of limes), and a little stir-fry oil, which is a combination of toasted sesame, peanut, and soy oils infused with green onion, ginger and garlic. This I tossed over some of our saute greens. I thinly sliced the steak, placed it on the bed of greens and threw some chopped cucumber on top to finish our salad bowls. I didn't come up with all this by myself, but loosely followed the preparation instructions for a similar salad recipe in How to Cook Everything. It turned out quite well, although I wish we would have had limes. I'll post our second flank steak meal tomorrow.