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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Recipes for lockdown: Thai red duck curry

I know, I know – duck curry is an extravagant dish to be posting in the middle of a global crisis, but in this set of recipes I'm aiming to use things that you can easily procure at the supermarket. As I said in my last blog post, I have had difficulty getting the basics, but more expensive, luxury items are fully stocked.

Coconut milk, like most tinned goods, have often run out at the big supermarkets, but try your local ethnic corner store. We have a Pakistani one near us, which is fully stocked with all sorts of spices, curry pastes and plenty of coconut milk.

I'm also trying to use up odds and ends that you might have in your cupboards. This is my excuse for using store bought red curry paste – I’ve had half a jar of it in the back of the pantry for some time. Since it is old, it has probably lost a bit of flavour, so I added some fresh garlic, ginger and lemongrass to my curry to revitalise it. I’ve marked these as optional in the recipe, since you don’t need them if you have fresh curry paste.

If you want to make your own red curry paste, then I highly recommend David Thompson’s recipe, though some of the ingredients will only be available in a Thai supermarket. If that is difficult, then this recipe by Nagi on Recipe Tin Eats is a great alternative. It is based on Thompson’s recipe, but with a slightly simplified ingredients list, most of which you should be able to get easily. The only thing I haven't often seen in the shops here is galangal, but you can substitute fresh ginger.

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People's Palace Thai, Manila

It did not really come as a surprise, having travelled around the Philippines for 2 weeks, that the best meal I had there was (a) in the cosmopolitan capital of Manila and (b) not Filipino. I am willing to be proven wrong – I did end up in some rather provincial places – but overall I found Filipino food to be too sweet, greasy, bland or all of the above.

In some ways it is a shame that we didn’t do Manila first, when we were excited to try the local food, as I have read about some places that do modern Filipino food and get rave reviews, but after 2 weeks of eating greasy meat, sweet bread, margarine coated everything and a lot of junk food at bus stations, we just weren’t keen to give them a go.

This is how we ended up at a modern Thai restaurant for our final meal in the Philippines. People’s Palace Thai is similar in style to a David Thompson restaurant, except with less emphasis on the cultural style of eating and more on traditional recipes cooked and presented in a modern style with a focus on high quality ingredients.

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Nahm round 2

As well as eating the street in Bangkok, I also treated myself to one top-end meal at Nahm, David Thompson’s restaurant. Thompson is an Australian chef who has earned himself a reputation as one of the world’s leading experts on Thai cuisine. His book Thai Food is referred to in my family as the ‘Thai Bible’, an encyclopaedic tomb on Thai food, history and culture, including over 300 recipes.

I went to his restaurant in London several years ago and was disappointed, but my experience at Nahm, Bangkok could not have been more different. I wonder whether this is because I left the chefs in charge of the menu choices.

The tasting menu at Nahm comes in three parts, canapés followed by the main meal – a dish from each section of the main menu served ‘family-style’ for the whole table – and then dessert. In this instance I was the whole table and, as before, I found myself wishing that they would westernise this part of the meal and serve it in stages. I do understand though that Thompson’s aim is to educate diners about authentic Thai cuisine and one part of that is the custom of sharing dishes.

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Eating the street in Bangkok

Wow, what an amazing few days!  3 days in Bangkok on the way to Sydney. Why haven’t I done this before? Not only did I get to fill my belly with all manner of delicious things, I also got to stay here for next to nothing:

Definitely made the right call choosing the hotel over the hostel. Who needs to meet new people when you wake up to this every morning? And best of all, no jetlag – doing it in stages is definitely the way forward.

So what did I eat?

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