Recently I've become infatuated with American food, or at least the idea of it. One of these is something as simple as the legendary Philadelphia Cheesesteak, something that's pretty much unknown to most British people. To me, this sounds glorious: it combines two of the world's greatest things, cheese and steak!

So I came across the great channel of PhillyboyJay who provides a nice video detailing how to cook an authentic cheesesteak. And it's sure authentic as far as I can tell, having never visited Philadelphia! I can only recommend his video, I keep rewatching it to drool at the result.

It's remarkably simple to make: onion, rib-eye steak, and cheese and that's basically it, plus Jay's seasonings: Worcestershire sauce, garlic powder, salt and pepper. The challenging part is to fit the result into some existing form of bread container that we can access in the UK. I remember at some stage you were able to buy sub rolls -- what the Americans refer to as "hoagie rolls" -- in the UK, but I haven't seen them for a while, and they were always nearly half the size of the US ones anyway.

For this I compromised by just using two hot dog rolls, which are readily available. Honestly it's not great, because the ability to make a single giant sandwich is really one of the attractions of this recipe, but we have to make do with what we have, or as every political commentator keeps saying these days, "we are where we are".

Melting the cheese inside the pan isn't really practical with these rolls sadly, because they're too small to efficiently contain a liquidy result. Instead we have to melt the cheese in the microwave. (boo!)

The result is delicious, though -- how could it not be? -- and feels nicely indulgent, the springy-textured steak pieces having a hint, strangely, of the squeaky texture of halloumi.

One thing that's easy to forget with this recipe is to use pepper!