Salmon with Homemade Teriyaki Sauce, Spinach and Noodles – Fine Dining at Home!

The Wife and I are pretty ordinary people. That is the wife is pretty and I am ordinary. We don’t go crazy with fine dining in multi-starred restaurants and I usually restrict my wine budget to less than the price of a tank of petrol. It’s not that I object to great food and fine wines. I did a lot of fine dining in my younger days as an advertising account director. Not quite the stuff of Mad Men, but close enough. Nowadays, I get a bit miffed when my partaking in a meal is like a bit-part actor in a Broadway show, where the chef is the star with a chorus line of waiters in support. My role is only to eat the food, not complain and then pay the exorbitant bill when the culinary curtain falls. No, This is not for me. I prefer simpler things.

Most weeks, if we are not dining out in multi-star style, there will be a day when we dine on salmon, usually served with some lovely spinach. This helps us get our five a day, our Omega fish oils and other good stuff. It tastes pretty good too. Sometimes, like all things in life, it needs a bit of dialling up. That’s where my Homemade Teriyaki Sauce comes into its own.

Canadian daughter rang while I was preparing the ingredients shot. Happy days!

Speaking of dialling, youngest daughter called from Toronto while I was taking the shot. That dialled things up a bit too.

The ingredients for my Homemade Teriyaki Sauce are as follows:

• 2 tablespoons of Mirin
• 2 tablespoons of Light Soy Sauce
• Half a tablespoon of sliced and diced ginger
• Half a tablespoon of dark brown sugar
• Half a teaspoon of cornflour diluted in 2 teaspoons of water

The quantities are not exact. Try it or something like it and see what works for you.

Place all the ingredients bar the cornflour mixture into a saucepan and bring to a rolling boil.

I used the very accurate “a slop of this and a dash of that” approach. It works.

Simmer for 10 minutes and add the cornflour mixture to thicken and glaze the sauce. Decant to a serving jug. I only have a two of these jugs. They appear in numerous posts.

Side note on my pair of jugs: This side note has the potential for some ribald humour. I will avoid that. The jugs were a wedding present given to myself and my current wife, some 30 years ago. They have held up better than my sense of humour. 

This is a lovely sauce. Perfect for the weekly salmon dinner.

We cooked the spinach, with a little chilli, in the wok. While this was happening, we also grilled the salmon with a little black pepper and boiled the noodles too. A simple bit of assembly was all that was left for us to do. I can’t enthuse enough about this combination. The sauce brings this from ordinary to multi-star (If they gave stars for cooking at home). It is very tasty and is now added to our roster of healthy and delicious dishes. Add it to yours. You deserve a bit of fine dining yourself.