Great starter, finger food at a party or in the freezer ready for hungry after school snack.

Ingredients

Fish Cakes

800g snapper or barramundi fillets

3 cloves, garlic chopped

4 cm piece ginger peeled and chopped

1 tbsp fish sauce

1 tsp sugar

½ tsp freshly ground black pepper

3 spring onions, white to light green part, sliced

oil, for shallow frying

Nước Mấm Chấm Dipping Sauce

3 tbsp fish sauce

3 tbsp green kumquat juice, lime juice or rice wine vinegar

3 tbsp castor sugar

½ cup water

½ tsp minced garlic

½ tsp thinly sliced Birdseye chili

Pickled Cucumber

1 Lebanese cucumber chopped into batons

3 tbsp Nước Mấm Chấm sauce

½ cup white vinegar

Instructions

Start Fish Cakes

Remove the skin and bones from the fish fillets and cut the fish into rough chunks. Put the fish ginger and garlic in a food processor and process to a paste. Add the fish sauce, sugar, pepper and spring onion and process until combined. Cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Prepare Dipping Sauce

In a small bowl combine all the ingredients for the dipping sauce and stir till sugar dissolved. Check for taste, and adjust to balance the flavours. Serve the fish sauce into bowls, one for each person. Set aside.

 Prepare Pickled Cucumber

In a bowl combine 3 tbsp of dipping sauce and the vinegar with the cucumber, stir and set aside.

Fry Fish Cakes

Prepare a tray for balls and a tray with paper towel for cooked fish cakes.

Remove fish mix from fridge, put some oil in a bowl and using lightly oiled fingers, form the fish mixture into small balls. Place balls on a tray or plate.

Heat a small amount of oil in a frying pan, add the fish balls pressing to a patty as you place them. the patties will take about  4–5 minutes on one side and 2-3 mins on the other, or until they are golden and cooked through.

Batch fry them, wiping clean the frying pan between batches.

Serving

Put some pickled cucumber on each plate, arrange some fish cakes. Serve with the dipping sauce bowls.

Storage

The fish cakes, once cooled, can be sealed in zip lock snack bags to freeze and pulled out for snacks and lunch boxes.