Thai Fish Cakes with Herb and Soba Salad

Spring is here and what better way to start than with a delicious warm salad. I know I keep banging on about my garden but seriously, I am just so pleased with the amount of produce it is gifting me with. This dish was again made from greens from the garden. I was inspired to make this recipe as I accidently bought too much fish the other day (note to self, don’t take advice from overweight fish mongers on portion sizes) I didn’t want to serve up another fillet of fish so i thought I’d turn the excess into some lovely light fish cakes.

Ingredients:

For the salad:

½ bunch of Mint

1 x bunch of Coriander

½ bunch of bok choy

2 x stalks of celery

1 x Banana chilli

1 x stick of soba noodles (cooked and still warm)

1 lime

2 tsp Sesame oil

1 tsp Fish sauce

Drizzle of olive oil

For the fish cakes:

I large fillet of white fish

1 banana chilli

2 heaped teaspoons of Thai curry paste (I make up my own so be careful with the bought ones as I’m unsure of their strength)

Method

Preheat your oven to 180°C. Bring a small saucepan of water to the boil then carefully lower in your soba noodles and cook for about 3-4 minutes drain them immediately, rinse them under warm water and set them aside for your salad.

For the fish cakes use a food processor to blend all of the ingredients together until minced. Then spoon out the mixture and shape it by hand into little patties.

Shallow fry the patties until golden on each side then pop them into your preheated oven for a couple of minutes to finish.

While your fish cakes are in the oven you should have time to make your salad. The only things that need to be sliced are the banana chilli and maybe the bok choy. The rest of the herbs just need to be picked off their stalks and thrown into a large mixing bowl with all of the other ingredients. Use tongues to mix the salad thoroughly. Pile mounds of the salad onto your plates then take the fish cakes out of the oven and pop them on top of the mounds.

The only thing I would perhaps add to this dish in the future would be some crushed nuts.