cheese steaks with peppers

I don’t really talk about my job on this blog, but I get a whole lot of personal satisfaction out of my career. I’m a graphic designer and I do a whole lot of work for room service and restaurants. Yes, I look at food all day, which might just explain why when I get home I have the intense desire to make delicious dinners. Although many of our clients are high end and supply us with some of the most beautiful and appetizing food photography, I also work with many people who don’t know what they want and leave everything to my discretion. This is when the job is a lot of fun. Like, for example, one restaurant on Yonge Street in Toronto called “I Went To Philly”. They told me to just come up with something and use a stock image of a cheese steak. Unfortunately we don’t have any on file and every image search came up with unappetizing photos. Since this client is easy going, and I was desperate to fulfill his request for a cheese steak photo, I decided to use the photo I took of our Philly Cheese Steaks from the other night for his ad.

The November 2012 issue of Everyday Food Magazine features a recipe for Cheese Steaks with Peppers which were the perfect way to use up the rest of our steak from the previous night's dinner. Probably the biggest challenge in this was to make the cheese sauce. Using evaporated milk and provolone, I could not get a smooth and creamy consistency, it tasted great but I became frustrated (especially since my photo for the ad was hanging in the balance) I opted to blitz the cheese sauce in the blender. That did the trick, however, the flavour somehow changed and it because extremely unappetizing.

Here is our finished steak and it looks a lot better than it tasted. I was really not pleased with the result and just left the cheese sauce off.