Recipes for lockdown: Thai fish cakes

If you have some leftover red curry paste from my last lockdown recipe, then this is a great way to use it up.

Thai fishcakes are one of my favourite Thai snacks. I often make them as a canapé or starter for an Asian themed meal, because they are incredibly easy, but deceptively so – people are always very impressed that I have made them from scratch. I prepare the mix ahead of time and shallow fry them till golden on the outside, but not cooked through, then finish them in the oven when I am ready to serve. Less faff and means I can actually talk to my guests.

The fish cake recipe is based on David Thompson’s, but with a few of the more exotic, hard to find ingredients replaced with things you can easily get in your local supermarket. If you can’t get fresh kaffir lime leaves, don’t substitute for dried, just skip them or use zest of lime instead. Likewise, the original recipe calls for snake beans, but I have never seen them in a shop in London, Asian or otherwise, so I just use fine green beans. 

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Mum's Vietnamese Chicken Salad

To call this ‘Mum’s Vietnamese salad’ is slightly misleading because (a) she isn’t Vietnamese and (b) she acquired the recipe from a friend called Jane many years ago. However, it has become a family favourite, which has morphed and evolved over the years, each of us adding our own details. And what makes a recipe your own, if not refining an old favourite to suit your tastes? Surely this is how all the best home recipes have been developed.

When I asked Mum to remind me of the recipe a few years back, I was surprised that she said she puts coriander in it. I once did that many years ago much to the distaste of my younger sister. She’d said she preferred it without and, being an annoying older sister, I decided to put it in anyway to see if she could tell. Of course she could, it's such a distinctive flavour. Now that I am much older, I can admit that she was right. It is more subtle and refined with just mint and that has become my preference.

My main addition to Mum’s recipe is that I have started pickling the onions rather than adding them fresh. I got the idea from Uyen Luu, who has a similar recipe in her cookbook, My Vietnamese Kitchen. I think it lifts the dish and makes it something really special.

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Tomyumpkin soup

“Daa-aa-aad. What’s for dinner?”

I remember pumpkin soup being one of the most disappointing answers to this daily question when I was a kid. It wasn’t that I didn't like it. It's just that my Dad's a chef and in a house full of delicious things pumpkin soup was, well...

"Boring!"

Until recently, I never cooked it for myself. Then my friend, Alex, made me pumpkin soup with tom yum paste in it. It was a revelation.

Adding tom yum paste to pumpkin soup turns it into something special. I now look forward to it and make it often, and I have converted others along the way.

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Larbilicious

One of the nice things about writing this blog is that I find out a lot of interesting things in the process. I have been making larb for years – it is a staple canapé for our annual Christmas Eve party and Dad entrusted me with it early on because it is extremely easy. I have always thought it was ubiquitous in Thai cuisine, just as it is in Sydney’s Thai restaurants, but I have just discovered that it is actually a regional dish from Isan, in north east Thailand, and probably originated further afield. In his book, Thai Food, David Thompson shares some theories on the salad’s historic origins:

A larp is an ancient salad. Some argue that it has the same origins as steak tartare, raw meat eaten with onions. The merchants of this part of Asia, the Haw, may have helped to spread the dish from the south-west of China and now, throughout northern Thailand, there are adaptations of this style of salad. 

Wikipedia suggests that larb may have come to Thailand from Laos:

Laotian cuisine has strongly influenced the neighboring cuisine of Northeastern Thailand (Isan) ... The most famous Laotian dish is Larb ... a spicy mixture of marinated meat and/or fish that is sometimes raw (prepared like ceviche) with a variable combination of herbs, greens, and spices. 

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Smoky eggplant (aubergine) and chilli relish

Inspired by David Thompson's Nahm and Longrain's Martin Boetz

I’m all about the relishes at the moment.

This one was inspired by a recent meal at Nahm, David Thompson’s Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in Mayfair. One of the dishes we had was grilled Chiang Mai chilli relish served with trout and lemongrass, pork crackling and herbs. The relish was the highlight, not only of the dish, but of the whole meal. Sadly, its accompaniments were rendered rather bland and tasteless beside it. The pork crackling should have worked, but there was little of it and what there was had been cut up so fine you would be forgiven for missing it entirely. I would have happily foregone the trout in favour of some chunky, salty, crispy strips of crackling for dipping.

Inspired to right these wrongs, I decided to make the relish at home suitably accompanied by lashings of crispy pork belly (more on that in a subsequent post). I did a search online, but was unable to find Thompson’s recipe at the time. Instead I ended up with Martin Boetz’s Roasted eggplant (aubergine) and chili relish from his book Modern Thai Food. I had an eggplant in the fridge that needed using so I decided to try out his recipe.

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