Anyone for fishcakes?
The way the cooking duty fell on our recent Level 3 course had me preparing the main meal on three occasions, on top of which I had volunteered the first night. The cleaning up generally fell to my partner, Kevin. He also helped with serving when he came on watch.
The menu was planned and the ingredients bought before we started the course. Generally I would look at the menu and ask Eric, our skipper what I could use. This worked, until the last day when there was Chilli sin Carne on the menu. In the galley the skipper had laid out my ingredients:
- tinned salmon;
- sweet potato;
- Smash;
- couscous;
- tomatoes;
- cannellini beans.
Ho hum. I am sure I can make something from this. Just not vegetable chilli. And not fishcakes. It would never have crossed my mind to make fishcakes! But those were my instructions. Eric likes them. So I set to. I cooked and mashed the sweet potato with the cannellini beans then added the salmon. By the time I’d made up the Smash it was far too runny but I had used all the granules and thought it would be ok, so added it to the mix. Mistake 1.
There was no way this mix was going to allow itself to be moulded into fishcakes. We had some plain flour in the cupboard. Flour can be used to thicken sauces. So I added flour. Lots of it, a bit at a time. Mistake 2.

A sticky mess, making fishcakes
At some point during this palaver Eric must have got hungry and bored with waiting for the food. Bob, this week’s man overboard dummy, went for a swim. It didn’t make the food come any quicker – in a man overboard drill we have to turn off the gas and go help.
We did eventually serve up fishcakes with a tomato and rice salad. Some even said they could taste the salmon! I think they were just being polite. We had made far too many. Mistake 4. There was plenty of seconds. Eric wanted more. Kevin gave him four extra! I wonder what he did with them?
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Take a recipe book next time!!
Or better still, give the skipper the recipe book!
Eric seemed to have recipes in his head. The problem was with me making the mashed potato too runny – and adding it anyway – and then adding flour.
There will be recipes for the meals we have to cook. Plus we will have all mine – on Springpad accessed from my tablet.