Food, glorious food. And also fishcakes

Thinking about next week’s dinner while enjoying yesterday’s leftovers.

Most weeks we pop into Rathmines Library while the nippers are doing extra curricular activities. It’s a real refuge and extremely kid friendly. I usually wander over to their recipe book collection and end up lugging a hard backed tome home. Libraries are great for many things, not least being able to try before you buy on books such as this. There are quite a few books on my recipe bookshelf that I wish I had test run before buying.

Anyway this week is Nigel Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries
which has been firmly placed on my Amazon wishlist. I know it’s been around since 2005 and was recommended to me way back then but there you go. I get to things in my own time. One of these days…

I already made what he calls English Apple Cake but instead we made Irish Apple Cake using apples from the garden and the breadcrumbs from the brown bread monster encountered on my brown bread odyssey. (As an aside next stop on the voyage of discovery is Imen McDonnell’s recipe currently residing on one of my many Pinterest boards.)

So I had a thoroughly enjoyable lunch perusing Mr. Slater’s diary while munching through my super wholesome lunch. It hadn’t started out so well yesterday. This week’s menu included the wholly uninspiring entry for yesterday evening; “Fish from freezer”. Oh. Yum. Thankfully I had also added a reminder to my phone totake said fish from the freezer the night before. I was so glad I tell you. So freaking glad. So it was now 5.30 and I was no closer to a “delicious meal featuring perfectly cooked fish” except for the defrosted-ness of three small mackerel fillets and one salmon fillet to feed five-ish. I’m not the most inspired when it comes to fish at the best of times. What I really wanted was soup. It was a cack day that needed a delumptious, hugger of a soup to save it and all I had was cold fish.

So I did my usual and did a Google search for salmon and mackerel and found this recipe for which I actually had all the ingredients. Okay I had no herbs so I lashed in some sad looking spring onions. I added a dash of Cayenne Chilli Pepper, only used one egg because well you know… However my big problem with fishcakes persisted. These were lovely: held their shape well, no frying involved as they are oven baked and a nice balance of potato and fish but what the heck do you eat fishcakes with? We went with couscous and sweetcorn but it was all a bit, well, yellow. We had no dipping sauce. Maybe a tartare sauce would have worked.

However with two left over I picked up a bag of rocket and baby leaves while in the shops today to which I added quartered cherry tomatoes, diced cucumber, crumbled Gorgonzola, vinaigrette and a dash of honey and had a delicious lunch. You see I never think of salad when the nippers are around because I just end up throwing it out. Ungrateful wretches.