Flat Iron Steak with Balsamic Glaze

I use a flat iron just about everyday on my hair but it's not everyday that I get to cook and eat a flat iron steak.  In case you've never tried one, they are pretty tasty, not as tender and succulent as a filet mignon but not as tough as say a chuck roast.  In restaurants they normally show up on your plate as a square of beef but when you buy them in the store they normally are long rectangles, weighing between 2-3 pounds.

Here's what  mine looked like:

To season it, I rubbed a little olive oil onto the meat and then sprinkled it with coarse sea salt and fresh ground pepper.  While that sat, I assembled butter (1-1/2 tsp), balsamic vinegar (1/2 cup), chopped garlic (1 clove) and some cut mushrooms.

The recipe I was following didn't call for mushrooms but they were on sale at the store and the husband loves mushrooms so I figured I'd tweak things just a little.  I melted the butter in the pan and then added the steak.

I like my steak rare, so I cooked it about three to four minutes on each side (my steak was about 1.5 pounds and not very thick.)

Once the steak was cooked, I put it on a plate and added the chopped garlic to the pan.

After about a minute, I added the balsamic vinegar.  Smoky!

Now is the time to scrap all the steak goodness up off the bottom of the pan so that it can help season the sauce.  After doing that, I added in the mushrooms and let them cook until they were nice and tender.

Earlier in the day I had thrown a couple of baking potatoes into the crock pot so those were ready to go once the steak and sauce were done.  If you've never used the crock pot for baked potatoes, I highly recommend it.  I rub them with a little butter, sprinkle them with some coarse salt, wrap them in foil, punch a couple of holes through the  foil to let the steam out and then cook them on low all day.  It doesn't get much easier than that.

Time to slice the steak and assemble a plate.

The mushrooms really absorbed a lot of the sauce so next time I might use a little more butter and vinegar to make a little more sauce but overall I think this all turned out really well.  I did have enough sauce to spoon a little over the steak, I just didn't get a picture of that.  We added salads to this to help add some healthy greens.

The whole meal (excluding the slow cooked potatoes) took about half an hour to make which is a success in my book.