Dinner Last Night

One of the greatest dishes I learned from my college days of studying restaurant management was "stuffed flank steak". You take a big, thick, flat flank steak, slice it through it flat-wise so it opens like a book, and then pound it flat. Then you layer a vegetable stuffing on top of the meat, roll it up like a sleeping bag, tie it in a bundle, then coat the whole thing with honey mustard and then bread crumbs. Then you bake it, slice it up like a meatloaf, and cover it in a red wine sauce.

Or at least that is how I remember it from 10 years ago... the last time I cooked it.

Things started going wrong right from the beginning: First, you can't get flank steak in Thailand. (I asked Bob, the meat expert, via phone from the market, and he confirmed this.) I bought just regular steak instead. Bad idea: Flank steak is crap... really tough, but for this recipe, toughness is a good thing since you want to slice it tween, beat it paper-thin and roll it up. My steak fell apart. I managed to get the stuffing right, and roll it up, but the loaf was barely holding together. I covered the thing with honey mustard, rolled it in bread crumbs and put it in the oven.

The sauce really went bad. I forgot completely how to make it and wasted a whole $8 bottle of wine trying to get it right. It was so wrong.

The loaf came out, but the middle wasn't cooked well. That didn't really matter because trying to slice it and the entire thing just collapsed into a big pile of meat and stuffing... which sounds nice, but it was exceptionally bland without the sauce.

I tried my best to eat my mistake, but it really was beyond all hope. I gave the rest to my maid Go, who said she wanted to take it out, separate the meat from the stuffing, and try to make something Thai out of it.

Not so big a deal, except for wasting the bottle of wine. There are lots of recipes on-line for stuffed flank steak that I can turn to next time, but with no flank steak in the kingdom, it's pointless to try again.