Potatoes and steak... smashed and sauced!

Potatoes... oh how we love thee. Mashed, roasted, fried or baked - however you want to prepare them, you'll easily get my attention. I needed a side to serve with our protein dish tonight and potatoes sounded like just the ticket. This time, we went with a method that we've never tried before.

There really isn't anything unusual about these Crispy Smashed Fingerling Potatoes, but the simplistic nature of the recipe yielded delicious results! And really, how could you go wrong with 4 ingredients, including salt and pepper? We're sold!

Fingerling potatoes are not always easy to find, but we've had the best luck locating them at the local farmers markets around here. If you can't find them, small new potatoes would be a good replacement. To soften the potatoes slightly and give them a head start, they are brought to a boil in salted water and left to cook until they were just tender. You should be able to pierce them with a knife, but they shouldn't be so soft that they are falling apart. Once drained and given a chance to cool, each potato is flattened by smashing them down with the flat bottom of a heavy saucepan - this gives the potatoes more surface area to crisp up as they are roasted. You don't want them paper thin though as they would not hold together... just press down enough so they are of an even thickness.

The now-flattened potatoes are drizzled with oil and dotted with sprinkles of salt and fresh ground black pepper. Halfway through roasting, you'll want to flip the potatoes and give them a few more drips of the oil, along with another dose of salt and fresh ground black pepper, so both sides have a chance to be exposed to the heat. Crisp on the outside, while still being moist on the inside, Jeff and I ate way more of these golden potato discs than we should have... it was too hard to stop! With an easy enough method to remember, you can bet these will be on our table again, and soon!

Once those potatoes were in the oven, I got the food processor buzzin' to make the sauce for this Garlic-Rubbed Flank Steak with Chimichurri Sauce. Lots of fresh parsley, lemon juice, crushed red pepper, smoky cumin and a garlic clove are whirled together until the ingredients are finely minced. With the processor running, extra-virgin olive oil is drizzled in, along with a tablespoon of broth to loosen the sauce up. If you don't have broth already opened in the fridge, don't open some just for a tablespoon - water would be fine.

Now that the sauce was done, I gave a big 'ol hunk of flank steak a nice massage with a large clove worth of minced garlic - be sure to work those pungent bits all through the grain of the steak. Grilled until the steak still had a light pink hue to the center, don't forget to allow enough time for the steak to rest, once off the grill, to give the juices a chance to redistribute into the meat. Thinly sliced against the grain, the plated portions of steak are then drizzled with a healthy dose of the Chimichurri Sauce. The sauce was tangy, bright and had a slightly smoky kick that married well with the natural flavor oozing from the tender slices of steak. I think I'll try this sauce again and use it as a marinade - maybe swap out half of the parsley with cilantro for a different profile?

Recipes
Crispy Smashed Fingerling Potatoes
Garlic-Rubbed Flank Steak with Chimichurri Sauce