Fish cakes, Fish cakes

As soon as I started thinking about this post, that "Fish Heads" song came into my head. (You know, "Fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads. Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum." That one. Thanks to the wonder of YouTube, you can even watch it here. )

For a person who's been mostly a vegetarian for much of her life, I'm perhaps a bit fonder of fish cakes than I should be. They're so hard to resist though--all neat and crisp and compact. I've often ordered them in restaurants, but I only started cooking my own fish cakes in the past 4 or 5 years.

First, I was a devotee of this Amanda Hesser recipe, first published in the NY Times magazine in 2004. These are definitely tasty, and I made them with cod as well as with other white fish. I haven't made them in awhile, but I'd like to again.

Last year, everyone I knew was making these salmon cakes from Not Eating Out in New York, and while I enjoyed them, there was a bit too much mayonnaise in them for my taste, and I never succeeded in not having them fall apart in the pan.

So, I have a history of falling for fish cakes, and it had been a year or so since I'd last made them. So when I saw Melissa Clark's column in the NY Times food section a few weeks ago, I knew I had my next fish cake project before me. Her column was about using leftover mashed potatoes from Thanksgiving, and the potatoes serve as the base for these salmon cakes. She mixes them with salmon, spinach, bread crumbs, and eggs, makes them into patties, chills them and then fries them in a little bit of oil.

I made these last week, pre-Thanksgiving. Alex had made an early Thanksgiving dinner for his daughters but somehow never got around to making the mashed potatoes. Still, he'd peeled and cooked the potatoes and had them sitting in cold water, and he kindly donated them to the salmon cake experiment. (He was repaid in salmon cakes, of course.)

I was also glad that, on a whim, I had bought a little bag of panko at the store. I'd never used panko before, and I can no longer remember what inspired me to buy some, but when I was getting ready to make the salmon cakes (and didn't want to run out to the store again), I was glad I had.

These are quite easy to make, though you do you have to think ahead so that you have your salmon cooked, your potatoes mashed and your spinach thawed. You mix it all together in one sticky mess along with the eggs and bread crumbs.

And then you set up your dipping station--a bowl of flour, a bowl of beaten egg, a bowl of bread crumbs or panko.


And then you take a spoonful of the fish/potato/spinach mixture and make it into a patty, which you then dip first in the flour, then in the egg and finally in the bread crumbs.


After they've chilled in the refrigerator for a half hour or so, you can fry them up in a bit of olive oil. I think the panko helps them not absorb as much oil, but a blotting with a paper towel is advised.


I'd forgotten to buy dill at the grocery store, so I skipped Melissa's suggested garlicky dill cream, though it sounded delicious, and just ate them with tartar sauce out of a jar. (A travesty, I know.)

Next time, I might add something oniony to the mix--maybe some chopped green onions or a bit of shallot. That was the only thing missing, I thought. Otherwise, it's a very nice combo, and the texture is great.

My one warning is that this makes a BIG batch of fish cakes. I believed Melissa when she said this would make 12 patties, and I made a full batch. I ended up with 17 patties, which was more than I'd bargained for. I became the fish cake fairy and brought them to work to give to colleagues to have for their dinners. Next time, unless I'm planning a fish cake party, I'm going to make half a batch instead. I also kept the uncooked ones in the fridge, and we ate them over the course of the week. If you cook them ahead of time, you can just reheat them in the toaster oven, and they still taste good, but I made most of them fresh. One last shot of the plethora of fish cakes, even after I'd cooked the first batch . . .

Still, I think these are definitely worth making fresh mashed potatoes for, and I'm adding them to my fish cake repertoire.

Potato, Salmon and Spinach Patties With Garlicky Dill Cream

from Melissa Clark's "A Good Appetite" column in the New York Times

Time: 45 minutes plus at least 30 minutes’ chilling

FOR THE POTATO SALMON PATTIES:

10 ounces frozen chopped spinach, thawed

2 cups mashed potatoes, chilled

8 ounces cooked salmon fillet, flaked

2 1/2 cups panko or bread crumbs

4 large eggs

2 teaspoons kosher salt

1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

3/4 cup all-purpose flour

FOR THE GARLICKY DILL CREAM:

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1/2 teaspoon salt, more to taste

1 cup sour cream or Greek yogurt

1/4 cup chopped fresh dill

Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Olive or vegetable oil for frying.

1. Squeeze as much water from spinach as possible. Place in a bowl and add potatoes, salmon, 1 cup panko, 2 eggs, salt and pepper; mix well to combine.

2. Place remaining bread crumbs in a wide, shallow bowl. Place remaining eggs in a second bowl and beat lightly. Place flour in a third bowl.

3. Form spinach mixture into 3-inch patties, about 3/4-inch thick. Dip each patty into flour, tapping off excess, then the egg, letting excess drip into bowl. Coat evenly with panko crumbs. Transfer patties to a large baking sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes and up to 4 hours.

4. Meanwhile, make dill cream: In a mortar and pestle or with the back of a knife, mash garlic and salt together to make a paste. Stir it into the sour cream or yogurt. Add dill and pepper. Taste and adjust seasonings, if necessary. Chill until ready to serve.

5. Heat 1/4-inch oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat; if using olive oil, you don’t need to use good extra virgin oil. Cook patties in batches, turning once halfway through, until golden and cooked through, about 3 minutes a side. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate to drain. Serve hot, with a dollop of dill cream.

Yield: 12 patties (or, actually, more like 16 or 17, unless you make them really big)

Leftover Experiment

So, earlier last week, I made a very large pot of soup. It was good soup, to be sure. An adaptation of the Farmhouse Minestrone in Lynne Rosetto Kasper and Sally Swift's book How to Eat Supper. (I said last week I was having a flirtation with it, and I still am.) It's a hearty soup--with vegetable stock and tomatoes, onions, carrots, and celery, chard and zucchini, cannellini beans and parmesan. For the hell of it, I added some orzo too. And I happily ate the soup for lunch and dinner and lunch again. And I didn't make much of a dent in the pot. (I usually count on Alex to help make a dent, but he was lax in his soup eating this time.)

On Sunday, the large container of soup was staring rather balefully at me from the fridge, and I was worried that I might end up wasting it, if I didn't start eating a lot of it, and quickly.

And then I remembered.

One of the great things about this cookbook is the number of variations offered. And on the very next page, after the soup recipe, was this one: "Tuscan Baked Minestrone with Garlic Bread (Ribollita)."

Ribollita is a classic Tuscan soup--basically bean and vegetable soup with bread. If you google it, you will find many, many variations. But this one turns it from a soup into a sort of casserole.

You take some stale bread, rub it with garlic and tear it into bite-sized pieces, then spread it on the bottom of a casserole dish. After drizzling that with some olive oil, you pour the soup on top of it and add some parmesan. Then you let it sit in the fridge over night. The next day, take it out and bring it to room temperature, then cook it, covered with foil, in a 375 oven for 40 minutes, then uncovered for another 5-10 minutes.

I have to be honest and say that I didn't know what to expect. It certainly seemed possible that it might not be very good. Baked leftover soup and stale bread? Hard to say whether it's a good idea or not.

But I should have trusted that Lynne Rosetto Kasper wouldn't steer me wrong. (Why else did I take her book The Italian Country Table out of the library every single fall for about 8 years in a row, simply for her multitude of tomato sauce recipes? After 8 years, I gave up . . . and just bought the damn thing.) I should have known that if she said that turning soup into a sort of casserole would be a good thing, it would be.

The resulting dish was savory and cheesy and tomato-y and good. The bread had soaked up all the liquid and was tasty rather than mushy. The orzo, though not traditional, was a nice addition. It turned out to be a fine way to use up a large container of soup I wasn't going to finish eating and 1/3 of a loaf of good bread that was too stale to eat (and, alas, probably even too stale to turn into bread crumbs.)

The only bad thing about this dish--it's not very photogenic. It would not be the thing you'd want to serve to impress someone with your prowess in making lovely food. It is, after all, leftover soup and stale bread dumped in a casserole together, and it looks like that. The taste, however, is more than the sum of its parts. Still, I brought my camera downstairs to take a picture and then changed my mind. A picture would not make anyone more likely to make it, and it's a dish I would encourage people to make.

Next time I make too much minestrone, I'm keeping this in mind. Or maybe, next time I make minestrone, I'll make too much on purpose so I can make this too.