Once again I asked The Bride if she had any requests for dinner. She stated that she desired something light, perhaps fish and some vegetables. So let it be done! I picked out the Fabulous Fish Cakes With Lemon Aioli on page 285.
The recipe calls for you to dice up the fish, and then add them into a mixing bowl along with the other ingredients before mixing it all together. I took a slightly different path. From my experience in making crab cakes, I've learned that you don't want to overmix the fish/crab, as they can be delicate. So I began by adding all of the non-fish ingredients to the bowl first, so that I could mix them together for even distribution BEFORE I added the fish bits. This way I can avoid destroying the fish as I try to mix everything together.
Next on the agenda was to make an aioli, which is basically a flavored mayonnaise. I've been doing a lot of Provencal cooking lately, and took some issue with calling this an aioli, but it's close enough.
One half salmon, one half halibut, in quarter-inch dice form:
I then gently mixed them together before adding them to the rest of the fishcake ingredients (that have already been mixed together by now).
With everything lovely, I set them in the fridge for an hour. This will help them form and stick together later, as the bread crumbs hydrate and become more glue-like.
With a Mediterranean theme already in the works, I took it to the next level with the side, which was the Middle Eastern Pita With Tzatziki Sauce on page 328.
I love tzatziki sauce...especially with fresh mint from my garden. I also went with Greek yogurt, as it tends to have an extra tang factor.
I prepped the vegetables for grilling so that I could turn my attention to the fish cakes.
Ever worked with grape leaves? I sure hadn't. I wasn't even sure where to BUY grape leaves. Then I remembered that Findlay Market has a specialty store that deals specifically with Mediterranean Imports. I figured that if they didn't have it, I didn't know who would. Turns out that they did, but the grapes leaves were "imported" from California. :)
Leaves are delicate, especially when packed tightly into a jar. I needed to get them out without tearing them, because they were going to be used to wrap the fish cakes. As I began gently taking them out of the jar, I realized that they would all come out at once. I guess it helped keep them from tearing, which was good.
So here's a grape leaf!
I placed a fish cake in the middle.
Then I closed the leaf around the fishcake.
I turned the leaf/cake over and placed it in another leaf.
So now the fishcake has a double-layer of protection, and the fishcake also couldn't fall through the grill (I had initially wondered how I was going to grill a fishcake).
The vegetables were ready, and now the fishcakes were ready as well. The Forge was just coming to temperature, so everything was looking good!
The vegetables came off the grill, I chopped them up, and mixed them together. This mixture would go inside the grilled pitas, and then be topped with the tzatziki sauce.
Similar to the grilled corn on the cob, the leaves may burn, but the fishcakes inside will be perfectly fine.
Dinner was served!
Light, refreshing, and delicious! I have plenty of grape leaves left, so I'm going to try this with crab as well in the near future. The fishcakes weren't overladen with add-ins, like some bush-league crab cakes that I've encountered in the past. They were primarily protein, which is ideal. The vegetable pitas were also nice. The Bride loved them, but requested something different like spinach instead of romaine lettuce. I'll see what I can do about that. In short, I like these recipes a lot, and both have the potential for a lot of experimentation.
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