Marinated Tuna

Finally after around 15 years, my Dad finally agreed to come and visit us. Not that we aren't on friendly terms, he's not keen on travelling much. Mum's last visit was when we bought our house some 11 years ago, so also definitely time for another visit, if nothing else to see how different the house now finally looks. She does like to travel and does a lot more now that she's retired.

Thus I worked out a very intensive schedule for their visit, to try and catch up on lost time and cram in as much as possible that they would both enjoy.

For their first dinner after arriving, I decided to scale up a lovely starter recipe from Mary Berry Cooks. The recipe looked easy enough and the photo was very pretty and I could feed both Mum and Dad, since Mum doesn't eat meat and Dad does. The original recipe is for starters, I trippled the amounts to get a full meal.

Ingredients

180 ml soy sauce
90 ml balsamic glaze
90 ml sesame oil
6 tbsp light muscovado sugar
1.2 kg tuna steaks
225 g sesame seeds
sunflower oil for frying

Method

1. Mix together the soy sauce, balsamic glaze, sesame oil and muscovado sugar in a large and wide-bottomed bowl, then set half of it aside as a dipping/drizzling sauce.
2. Cut the tuna steaks into strips of about 3 x 3 cm and place in the mixture to marinate for about an hour.
3. Place the sesame seeds in a flat bowl and heat up some sunflower oil in a pan.
4. Fry the strips, turning them carefully so they don't break. A couple of minutes on each side should do.
5. Remove from the frying pan and turn in the sesame seeds to coat well.
6. Serve with the saved part of the soy sauce mixture for dipping or drizzling.

I served these with Jersey Royal potatoes and steamed asparagus and my usual egg sauce. I'd also been lucky to find black sesame seeds and used half black and half white, which I thought looked rather pretty.

The amounts were way too much for 4 people, but it was very tasty and wonderfully easy to do. The soy sauce mixture was also very nice for other dipping as well, I'm sure it would work nicely with spring rolls or such.