Back to School - Tuna Fish Cakes

A quick and delicious lunch

You may think that as I career towards 50 that school is just a distant memory and I spend all my time thinking about early retirement, well not all of that is true.

Finding us in need of a tasty lunch and most of the food allocated to entertaining the following day, my eyes came to rest on a humble bowl of left over mashed potatoes. The cogs started turning and I was taken back to one of my first home economics classes back in 1978, when we made fish cakes.

I don't know how much mash I had in weight or cups, but it was a couple of decent "portions". I took a tin of tuna, it doesn't matter whether its flake or steak, although I would probably go for it in spring water or brine rather than oil and you could opt for a tin of salmon or a couple if tins of steamed mackerel as an alternative. It's all about making something out of what you've got.

I drained the fish and added it to the potatoes, mixed it all up with a tablespoon of chopped parsley and seasoned it well with salt and pepper.

My mix was about right, not too wet to form a shape and not so dry it was crumbly.  If your mix is too wet you might want to consider adding a tin of sweetcorn and frying the mix as fritters. If it's too dry you could add an egg yolk or two, which would also make it richer.

As an alternative you could substitute the parsley for dill or coriander, add some chopped spring onions, or some grated cheese, add some hidden vegetables like finely chopped peppers, tinned sweetcorn or spinach...the choices are endless really, just make sure you keep the mixture soft and pliable but not too wet.

Next decide how many fish cakes you want to make, I went for 6 medium sized ones. I just divided up the mixture and with floured hands (wet hands work well too, or you could use cling film to mould them) I formed 6 round patties around 1.5-2 cm thick.

 The next stage is crumbing. I always have a bag of chunks of stale bread in the freezer especially for moments like this. Simply whizz them to your desired texture in a food processor. If you don't have a food processor you can grate or chop to make crumbs or you can use shop bought crumbs or Panko. You will need quite a lot for this if you intend to double crumb like I do, but you can of course just do a single crumb if you are short of bread.

Place the crumbs in a flat bowl, put some flour in another and beat a couple of eggs in another. The trick then is to coat the patty lightly in flour (you may need to pat off the excess), coat in beaten egg and then in crumbs and then repeat the egg and crumbs until your patty is totally covered in a thick layer of crumb.

Now it's up to you how you cook these, I shallow fried mine in vegetable oil until the outsides were lovely and golden and crunchy, then patted off the excess oil with kitchen roll and finished them in the oven at around 180C for about 20 minutes until hot all the way through - I test with a skewer. However, you can just fry them, or just bake them, you could mix the crumb with some oil if you are going to bake them to crisp them up or spray them with oil.

Then all you've got to decide is what you're going to serve them with, we had ours with salad but I bet they are lovely with baked beans.