Come dine with us!

One thing on our giant list of to-dos for 2014 is to cook for our friends more. The Mr and I love having friends over but more often that not we will just order takeaway or pick up pre-made nibbles (everyone loves a cheeky duck spring roll!). So this year we vowed to ourselves to learn some new recipes.

Fast forward to Friday night…the show was finished the drinks were flowing and I had a genius idea…..let’s invite our two foodie friends over for dinner….tomorrow!! (I really shouldn’t be allowed to drink!)

What followed was a slightly hungover Saturday morning (well maybe it was more like midday!) spent reading every recipe the BBC Recipe site had to offer! What on earth were we going to cook? We didn’t have time for anything slow cooked or to make a pie from scratch (we had a ton of errands to run before I could even begin cooking….oops!) and it needed to satisfy the palettes of the best home cooks we know! (Apart from our beloved mums of course! 😉 )

I eventually stumbled across a yummy Beef Teriyaki dish (here is the BBC recipe) which didn’t take forever to make and seemed to have a reasonable amount of ingredients (we didn’t want to go buying a larder cupboard’s worth of sauces and spices!), they had served it with roasted vegetables but as this wasn’t to my taste I set about finding a yummy noodle recipe (we usually just chuck them in with whatever stir-fry sauce we have picked up at the store!). In the end I took the spicy noodle part of another recipe (this BBC recipe).

We followed the recipes pretty much to the letter, the only changes made were that we added some extra veg to the noodles, and multiplied the beef Teriyaki ingredients by 4 (as it was a 1 person recipe). And do you know what….it was pretty darn easy to make and had us thinking about our tendency to use shop bought sauces. What really is the point when this is just as quick?! We did have a few problems with timing and due to that (and cold plates) it cooled pretty quickly. But that aside, the beef was cooked to perfection (thanks to Mr M!) and the whole dish had just the right amount of heat to get those taste buds tingling! We really enjoyed it and I think we had some happy diners! Yay!

Oh and an added bonus was that there was a lot of the Teriyaki marinade left over – certainly enough for another meal – Score!

And here it is
Our take on Beef Teriyaki with Spicy Noodles