Kind of Thai Fishcakes

Just a quick recipe for you tonight that I made for me and my flatmate last night. We had a Thai inspired meal of fishcakes and stir-fried veg.

I'll be honest, it was my first time making these fishcakes and I completely made up the recipe so they still need a little bit of work, but I vowed to share my kitchen successes and failures on this blog so you're going to get it anyway!! Not that this was a failure - it was pretty nice, just not gobsmackingly beautiful - so why don't you play around with the recipe a little and you might find something more delicious than mine!



  
Serves 3 (us two and my dinner tonight!)

 

Ingredients

3 small portions of potato, peeled and chopped
1 stalk of lemongrass
your choice of stir fry veg, chopped - I used cabbage, pepper, broccoli and carrot
1 teaspoon sugar
splash of rice wine vinegar
3 fillets of white fish
3 teaspoons Thai Green curry paste (if you spend a little more on a better paste then this is more than enough because it'll be full of flavour, but if it's a cheapo one then you might need a little more!)
a handful of fresh coriander, chopped
1 red chilli, finely chopped
sea salt and black pepper
1/2 lime, squeezed
 olive oil 
1 small egg
plain flour
a drizzle of soy sauce
sweet chilli sauce (to serve)

Begin by getting a pan of water boiling on the hob. Slightly squash your lemon grass with the flat of your knife to release the flavours, then add to the pan whole (or in half if too long!). My intention here is to flavour the water - and subsequently the potato - with these gorgeous citrus flavours without them overpowering the fishcake.


Prepare all of your stir-fry veg and put in a bowl. Mix in the sugar and rice wine vinegar and leave to one side for later.

Then, spread the green curry paste over your fish fillets. Place them on a baking tray and wrap loosely with silver foil. This needs to go in a preheated oven until just cooked and flaky (probably at about 180 degrees for around 10-20mins depending on the size of your fillets).
  
Add your chopped potato to the pan of water and boil until soft (about 10mins).


Once the fish is cooked, remove from the oven and flake into a large bowl. Add the chilli, coriander and lime juice, and season with salt and pepper.

Once soft, drain the potatoes and remove the lemongrass stalk. Add a drizzle of olive oil and mash. Then add the potato to your fish bowl, mixing together.


Sprinkle your flour onto a flat surface. When the ingredients in your bowl are cool enough to touch, crack your egg into the bowl and combine with your hands. Collect a small handful into a ball and squash between the palms of your hands to make a fishcake shape. Lightly dip both sides into the flour and put on a plate ready to fry. Repeat until you have created all of your fishcakes.







Add a drop of olive oil into a pan (I used a griddle pan) and pop your fishcakes in. Cook for a couple of minutes on each side.

For your veg, simply add it to a wok with a dash of olive oil and soy sauce. Cook for a couple of minutes until the veg is starting to soften, but still with some crunch!



Serve up and enjoy with some sweet chilli sauce!

Food Delights in Belgrade

Well after a few weeks of dissertation madness, I've finally found time to blog again! Apologies that it's been so long, but I will attempt to make up for it with some more regular posts this month... finishing off the amazing food we had on our interrailing tour of Eastern Europe, some delicious meals from a family holiday to Pollenca, Majorca, and of course, some of my own recipes!!

Interrail Stop 6

So back to the interrail tour... this time I'll share with you some of the tasty treats we had in Belgrade, Serbia. We had a couple of stops before this in Budapest and Bratislava, but chose to spend our money on the beautiful and relaxing public baths instead of tasty dinners out.... so we were back to trying the local cuisine in Serbia.

? Kafana

One of the famous landmarks in Belgrade, the ? pub and bistro is about 200 years old and serves traditional Serbian food. From our experience of the local food, that means basically dishes with lots of meat and carbs - very  filling, stodgy and greasy - but oh so tasty!!


I think these few days in Serbia just about finished us off with greasy food, but we loved eating it at the time! The meal out to ? was absolutely delicious - I had a traditional burger which was nothing like burgers that we know in the UK, but more like a huge slap of meat mixed up with onions and shaped to about the size of my face!!








 My friend had something that we expected to be chicken... but it was unlike anything we had eaten before... basically chicken flattened to within an inch of its life and then rolled up around something that we couldn't name and coated in a sort of batter/sort of outer crisp. And somehow it tasted amazing! Then we shared a Serbian salad (basically cheese, tomato and white cabbage) and it just about balanced out all the stodge and grease.

The atmosphere of the place was awesome - we didn't get there until about 11pm as we had to run back for more money (being cheapskate tourists, we hadn't brought out enough cash!!) and the restaurant area was still buzzing. There were musicians playing to the tables and waiters happy to advise us on dishes.





A lovely meal and great place to try some of the unusual traditional dishes... definitely would recommend if you are visiting Belgrade. There's also an interesting history to the current name (involving the Church opposite disapproving of its name years ago as it was suggestive of a place of drinking and merriment, so they changed it to ? as a temporary name and then never changed it to anything else!)

Palačinka/Pancake

From a street cafe we also tried a Serbian palačinka... much like French crepes but somehow thinner and bigger, and we watched them make them like this!














We had them filled with ham, cheese, sour creme... yummy!! (although not to be eaten often - each mouthful felt like a day's worth of calories!!)

Pijaca/Green Market

Now a lot of the fruit and veg was cheaper around our Eastern Europe travels than it is in the UK, but nowhere was a cheap as the Belgrade Pijaca - we must have spent less than £2 and ended up with all of this!! Needless to say we had an all veg stir fry that night (and the day after, and the day after that!!) A great place to just wander around but you will come away with a lot more than you went for!!

So there you have it... after several weeks of not posting, here is a lengthy post about all the different food we sampled in  Belgrade!! I'd definitely recommend the ? Kafana and the Pijaca. Oh yeah, I should also mention that they give you a free shot of rakija on the morning walking tour... it's absolutely gross so take a bottle of water!!!