asian cucumber salad with seared flank steak

The recipe for this salad came from Mark's Daily Apple. I wanted lots of veggies but not another lettuce-based salad, and this totally delivered. It's super easy to make, pretty inexpensive if you already have stuff like sesame oil and rice vinegar on hand, and it's super tasty. The recipe calls for black sesame seeds but I couldn't find any, so I just toasted some white ones and it worked fine.

For meat to go with the salad, I wanted to stay kind of in the same flavor area, so I got some flank steak, brushed it with some hoisin sauce, and let it marinate for a while. When I was ready to cook, I preheated the oven to 450, then I got a pan ripping hot and seared the meat off for 1.5 minutes per side. The meat came out of the pan and onto a foil-covered cookie sheet in the hot oven, where it cooked for about 7 more minutes, total. The result was flank steak with a nice sear outside, still mostly rare in the middle, with a nice smoky hoisin crust.

I topped the meat with a little more hoisin, some chopped scallions, and served it alongside a big pile of the cucumber salad.

Nummy!