Prego rolls, veggie style

How to follow  a recipe without following a recipe at all. Which turns out, at first, pretty much as bad as one can imagine it would! But I'm not abandoning the recipe because i think i know better (tried that) - i just didn't have the right ingredients, so i improvised...

Here is the recipe I used: http://www.recipezaar.com/recipe/Portuguese-Garlic-Steak-Sandwiches-prego-No-Pao-95392. We don't eat meat, so I used Quorn's Seasoned Beef Style Strips. My first mistake was to disregard the fact that they were already flavoured (and spicy at that). For some reason, we also don't have onion in the house, so I used dried chives... dried garlic too - but those would not have made so much of a difference.

My second mistake was to try and 'incorporate' another recipe altogether (I don't get it! my gran does it! My mom does it!) so i added some oregano (and accidentally spilt some, so there was WAY too much). This is also where I added chilli flakes.

Anyway - it all smelled awesome while i was making it. I heated some butter, added the steak and garlic to it and fried it just enough to seal in the moisture and taste). Then I added the red wine to some more butter and the chives and it smelled even better. At the same time i was baking some rolls (Possibly my third mistake - I used long hot dog rolls instead of round sandwich rolls) but they were smelling beautiful too. My girlfriend said it smelled like a restaurant.

All good! Then i burnt the rolls. So i had to make more, which meant the beef strips were standing in the pan too long, with most of the moisture cooking away (i was trying to keep it warm, you see). Then the one place i did stick to the recipe let me down: it didn't say to butter the rolls.

So the end product was a little dry, because there was no sauce and no butter, although it tasted ok because Quorn's stuff is actually quite hard to dry out when you're using liquid like wine etc. It was also way too hot and, yes, i could taste the oregano all over it... I will make it again though. improvements on the way.