Philly Cheesesteak Pasta — The Steak That Started Something

Couldn't sleep Tuesday. Standard. But this time instead of lying in the dark cataloging every sound in the hallway and assigning it a threat level between zero and ten — which is a thing I do, which Dr. Mercer calls hypervigilance and I call Tuesday — I got up and went to the common area where there's a computer that takes eleven minutes to boot and I started writing. I don't know why. I didn't plan it. My hands needed something to do that wasn't squeezing a tennis ball and wasn't destructive and the keyboard was there.

I wrote about steak. How to cook a steak over a campfire. Not a grill — a campfire. The real kind, with wood, the kind Dad and I built in the fall pasture during roundup when we'd eat dinner out with the cattle because driving back to the house and back would waste two hours of daylight. You build the fire with hardwood if you have it, let it burn down to coals, set a grate over rocks on either side, and you cook the steak directly over the coals, high heat, fast. Three minutes a side for a one-inch cut. You don't flip more than once. You don't press it. You leave it alone and let the fire do what fire does.

I wrote it like instructions. No personal details. No war, no hospital, no explanation for why a twenty-one-year-old soldier is writing about campfire cooking at 0200 in a barracks in Colorado. Just: here's the fire, here's the steak, here's the method. I read it twice. It was short and plain and it said what it needed to say and nothing else. I don't know what I'm going to do with it. There's a food blog site — RecipeSpinoff — that one of the guys in my old unit's wife wrote for. I looked at it. People just write about food. That's it. They just write about food and put it out there and other people read it. That sounds like the simplest thing in the world and also completely terrifying, which is how I feel about most things that involve other people seeing the inside of my head. Even if the inside of my head, in this case, is just steak.

Made bratwurst on the grill Thursday. Nothing special — commissary brats, charcoal, the usual. But I thought about them differently. I thought about how I'd write it if I were going to write it. Brown the casing first over direct heat, then move to indirect to cook through. Don't split the casing or you lose the juice. Simple. Writable. The brats were good. The writing sits on the computer. I haven't posted it. I might. I might not. But it exists, and that's something. A thing I made that isn't smoke. A thing that lasts longer than a meal.

So here’s the thing—I wasn’t going to write about the bratwurst. That one stays on the computer for now. But I kept thinking about the idea of writing food that lasts, and I figured if I was going to post something, it should be the dish that actually got me thinking about all this in the first place: a Philly cheesesteak, pulled apart and put back together as pasta, which feels right for a guy who’s still figuring out how to do the same thing with himself. Here’s how I made it.

Philly Cheesesteak Pasta

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Total Time: 30 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

• 12 oz penne pasta
• 1 lb ribeye or sirloin steak, sliced thin against the grain
• 1 green bell pepper, sliced
• 1 medium yellow onion, sliced
• 8 oz cremini mushrooms, sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 1 cup beef broth
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 8 oz provolone cheese, shredded
• Salt and black pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Cook the pasta. Boil penne in well-salted water according to package directions. Before draining, reserve 1/2 cup of pasta water. Drain and set aside.
2. Sear the steak. Pat steak slices dry and season generously with salt and black pepper. Heat 1 tablespoon olive oil in a large skillet over high heat until smoking. Sear steak in a single layer, 1–2 minutes per side — work in batches so you don’t steam the meat. Remove to a plate and tent loosely with foil.
3. Cook the vegetables. Reduce heat to medium-high. Add remaining tablespoon of olive oil to the same skillet. Add onion, bell pepper, and mushrooms. Cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to caramelize, about 6–8 minutes. Season with salt and pepper.
4. Build the sauce. Add garlic and cook 1 minute. Pour in beef broth and Worcestershire sauce, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Let the liquid reduce by about half, 2–3 minutes.
5. Combine. Add the drained pasta to the skillet and toss to coat. Add reserved pasta water a splash at a time if the mixture looks dry — you want everything glossy and sauced, not soupy.
6. Finish with steak and cheese. Nestle the seared steak back into the pan over the pasta. Scatter provolone evenly over the top, cover the skillet, and let the cheese melt over low heat for 1–2 minutes. Serve immediately, straight from the pan.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 515 | Protein: 33g | Fat: 21g | Carbs: 47g | Fiber: 3g | Sodium: 610mg