Food ‘n Drink

After watching The Hairy Bikers – Mums Know Best, and seeing them make fish cakes it reminded me that I’d been wanting to try making my own for ages. David always used to say he didn’t like fish cakes as they tasted like hot cotton wool (that’s what he refers to for mash potato!), however I love fish cakes but the tasty ones can cost over £3 for 2!!

So today I decided to give them a go. It was a joint effort and for the first attempt we were quite chuffed with the outcome as they were really nice (“best fish cakes I’ve ever had” from David!). The next plan is to add this to my bulk cooking list, so make up a batch of them and freeze them. At this rate I’ll have a home-made frozen ready meal for every day of the week!

On to the recipe, these are the quantities we used, of course a fillet of fish and two potatoes won’t always weigh in the same ratio, but hey, it’s all cooked and it’s all edible, so adjust the quantities to suit your own tastes

Ingredients

1 fillet of smoked haddock, skinned and boned
2 potatoes (aim to have around 50% more of potato than fish)
6 spring onion finely chopped
Grated cheddar cheese
2 eggs
Fresh breadcrumbs (3 slices of white bread blended to breadcrumbs)
Plain flour
Milk
Butter/Margarine

Method

Boil the potatoes, drain and pat dry. Then mash (don’t add any milk or butter!) and allow to cool slightly. Add the spring onion and a few handfuls of grated cheddar and mix into the mash potato. Poach the fish in milk, either in a pan or in the microwave. To use the microwave put the fish into a Pyrex dish, add milk until it’s partially covered, then cover with cling film. Put on high for 3 minutes. Remove fish from dish but keep the milk. Pat the fish dry, flake and fold into the mashed potato mixture along with a beaten egg. Form into round shapes.

Beat the second egg and pour into a bowl. Put the breadcrumbs on a plate and some flour in another bowl. Take each fish cake, dip it in the flour, then in the egg and then in the breadcrumbs. Once they’re all done heat some oil in a frying pan and add the fish cakes. Fry until the breadcrumbs are golden brown all over.

We then put them on a baking tray into the oven on a 150 deg C heat to keep warm (you may need higher if you don’t have a fan oven).

Then I also made a simple cheese sauce to go with them by melting about a teaspoon of butter in a saucepan, adding about 2 teaspoons of flour, mixing it in to the melted butter, then the milk from the pyrex dish and a couple of handfuls of cheese. Sorry, no real measurements as I just go by the consistency and taste, but all good cookbooks should tell you how to make a simple cheese sauce.

These quantities made 6 large fish cakes in total

• Bookmark this page at:
• Del.icio.us -
• StumbleUpon -
• Spurl