This dish is called a fish garden because it contains masses of green fresh vegetables coupled to slices of deep fried fish. This is an excellent healthy dish with fish, fish oils and plenty of crisp vegetables all on a single plate.

Ingredients
500 gms White Fish (Hake, Cod, Haddock etc.)
3 Tablespoons Fish Sauce
2 Tablespoons Lemon Juice
2 Teaspoons Dried Flaked Chillies
2 Garlic Cloves
1 Tablespoon Chopped Red Onion
1 Teaspoon Toasted Rice
1 Tablespoon Chopped Spring Onion
1 Tablespoon Chopped Coriander Leaves
10 gms Mint Leaves
Oil for Deep Frying

Preparation
1. Clean the fish and deep frying until the fish is golden brown. Place into the serving plate.
2. Mix the flaked chilli with the lemon juice, fish sauce, toasted rice, and chopped spring onions. Spoon this thick 'sauce' over the fish.
3. Chop the garlic, red onion and mint and pile onto the plate to form the 'garden'.

Serve With
Chillies
Hot Fragrant Thai Rice
Lettuce
Cabbage
Cucumber
Green Beans

Deliciously salty sardines, we often eat with sticky rice. We uncle grows chillies and when he's out on the farm, he'd take a ga-tip filled with sticky rice, together with fried onions and a salted fried fish to eat for lunch. It's a simple combination but sometimes the simplest tastes work best.

Ingredients
2 Salted Sardines
1 Tablespoon Chopped Red Chilli
2 Tablespoons Sliced Onion
2 Kaffir Citrus Leaves
Coriander Leaves
Oil For Deep Frying

Preparation
1. Deep fry the sardines in hot oil for 2 minutes, remove and dry on kitchen paper.
2. Fry the sliced onion and chillies for 30 seconds use them to garnish the fish.
3. Slice the kaffir leaves and coriander leaves and add to the top.
4. Thats it! I told you this is simple peasant food!

Serve With
Sticky Rice
Fragrant Rice

Mackerel is a very underrated fish, it's cheap, its full of useful fish oils and has plenty of flavour. This is one of the ways we eat it, with a Kapi sauce made from shrimp paste.

Ingredients
300 gms Mackerel Fish
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Tablespoon Thai Shrimp Paste
5 Bird Chillies
2 Garlic Cloves
1 Teaspoon Dried Shrimp
5 Small Green Aubergines
1 Tablespoons Lemon Juice
3 Tablespoons Fish Sauce
2 Tablespoons Water
2 Tablespoon Brown Sugar
A Large Thai Mortar
Assorted Vegetables for Steaming

Preparation
1. Clean and chop the mackerel into halves, sprinkle with salt then grill until cooked.
2. Make the Kapi sauce by pounding chillies with garlic and shrimp paste. Then add the dried shrimp, small green aubergine, lemon juice, fish sauce, brown sugar, and water and pound a few times more, just to mix.
3. Steam the vegetables.
4. This dish is normally served with Thai Rice, steamed vegetables, the mackerel and the kapi sauce. When you eat it, you take some of the mackerel and sauce, together with some vegetables onto your rice plate and add a spoonful of the sauce.

Serve With
Thai Fragrant Rice

These fish steaks are baked in Thai herbs including lemon grass, and Kaffir lime leaves, giving a citrus taste to the fish. You can eat the herbs too, in Thailand we eat these herbs because they are good for digestion.

Ingredients
100 gms Fish Steaks
30 gms Chopped Lemon Grass
30 gms Chopped Coriander Leaves
5 Kaffir Lime Leaves
3 Garlic Cloves
1 Teaspoon Black Pepper Corn
2 Tablespoons Fish Sauce
2 Tablespoons Light Soy Sauce
1/4 Teaspoon Sugar
Tin Foil
1 Tablespoons Oil

Preparation
1. Clean the fish and place on the tinfoil.
2. In a Thai mortar, pound the garlic with black peppercorns, lemon grass, coriander, and kaffir leaves, until well ground up. Add the fish sauce, light soy sauce, sugar and oil in together pound a few more times to mix.
3. Spoon onto the fish, wrap the tinfoil up to keep the juices in and bake in the oven 190 degrees for 25 minutes.
4. Garnish with lemon to emphasize the citrus taste.

Serve With
Thai Fragrant Rice

A fun way to get children to eat their food - baby chicks made from potatoes and breaded shrimp in a nest of noodles. The noodles are optional, the birds look just as good if served in a basket.

Ingredients
200 gms Big Potatoes
1/2 Teaspoon Salt
10 Shrimp
2 Garlic Cloves
1/2 Teaspoon Pepper
1 Coriander Root
1 Tablespoon Light Soy Sauce
1 Egg
5 Tablespoons Breadcrumbs
Oil for Deep Frying
Black Sesame Seed (For the eyes!)
10 Tooth Picks
Noodles (Bami, Instant Noodles etc.)

Preparation
1. Whip the egg.
2. Pound the garlic and coriander root together.
3. Clean the shrimp, remove the shell but leave the tail on, be sure to cut down the back and remove the black thread gut.
4. Put a small lengthwise cut through the back of the shrimp, then bend the tail back on itself and bring it up through the cut you just made. This gives you the body and tail feathers of the chick.
5. Mix the pounded garlic and coriander over shrimp, together with the pepper and soy sauce.
6. Dip the shrimp in the whisked egg, then dip in the breadcrumbs to cover them.
7. Deep fry until the breadcrumbs are golden brown.
8. Peel the potatoes, cook in boiling water until cooked. Mash them with a little salt (no butter or milk, we want them firm!). Take some of the mash potato and roll into small balls, one for each bird.
9. Cook the noodles in a pan of boiling water, drain and set on the plate. Take a fork and swirl them around the plate so they look like a nest.
10. Assemble the birds by taking a shrimp, placing one of the potato balls on it, and adding 2 sesame seeds for the eyes. Break a toothpick in half and push it into the potato to form the beak.
11. Set them out in the noodle next and serve.

As summer arrives in the northern hemisphere, so do the barbecue recipes! When I was a child, we would go fishing and barbecue our catch right there next to the river. We'd season with lemon grass and kaffir, which grew next to the river and only the sauce would be pre-prepared.

Ingredients
500 gms River Fish
1 Stalk Lemon Grass
4 Kaffir Lime Leaves
Sea Salt

Preparation
1. Chop the lemon grass.
2. Clean and gut the fish, fill with the kaffir leaves and lemon grass slices.
3. Rub salt into the outside.
4. Grill over charcoal until cooked then serve with the following spicy sauce.

Ingredients for Sauce
5-8 Chillies
2 Garlic Cloves
1 Coriander Root
1 Red Onion
2 Tablespoons Fish Sauce
1/4 Teasoon Sugar
1 Tablespoon Lime Juice
Chopped Coriander Leaves

Preparation
1. In tinfoil, wrap the chillies, garlic, onion (cut into quarters) and coriander root.
2. Place the foil parcel on the grill until cooked.
3. Pound in a Thai mortar, add fish sauce, sugar, lime juice and chopped coriander.
4. Serve as a dipping sauce for the fish.

Fish is a good healthy dish, and this is a simple way to prepare it. Steam it with ginger & thyme, the flavours from the ginger go into the fish and help neutralize any 'fishy' smells as a bonus.

Ingredients
500 gms Sea Fish
120 ml Light Soy Sauce
50 gms Mushroom
20 gms Pickled Ginger
10 gms Thyme Leaves

Preparation
1. Scale & gut the fish. Your fishmonger can do this for you, but it's easy enough to scale a fish by scraping a knife backwards over the skin.
2. Place the fish in a suitable metal bowl, pour the light soy over it, add the ginger and thyme and mushrooms.
3. Steam for 15 minutes.
4. Serve with rice.

Spicy Ginger Salmon on Pak Choi

This dish is salmon with a ginger and chilli sauce sat on a bed of pak choi (Chinese cabbage).

Ingredients For the Salmon
2-4 Salmon Steaks
5 gms Mint Leaves
5 gms Coriander Leaves & Stalks
2 Bird Chillies
3 Cloves Garlic
1 Teaspoon Salt
1 Tablespoon Fish Sauce
Juice of a Lime
1 Teaspoon Chopped Ginger

Preparation
1. Blend the mint, coriander, chillies, garlic, salt, and ginger (all the dry ingredients) until smooth.
2. Add the fish sauce and lime juice and blend some more.
3. Marinade the salmon in this sauce for 30 minutes.
4. Wrap the salmon and marinade in foil and steam for 10 minutes to cook the salmon.

Ingredients For the Stir Fry
3-5 Pak Choi
1 Tablespoon Oil
1 Garlic Clove Chopped
1 Teaspoon Chopped Ginger
1 Tablespoon Oyster Sauce
1 Tablespoon Fish Sauce
40 gms Chopped Spring Onions Sliced
2 Big Red Chillies Chopped

Preparation
1. Drop the pak-choi into boiling water for 30 seconds.
2. Into a frying pan, heat the oil and fry the garlic and ginger until the smell is released.
3. Add the chillies, the spring onions, the oyster sauce, fish sauce and stir fry for 30 seconds.
4. Layout the pack choi, place the salmon and cooking juices on that, and pour the stir fried onions and sauce over the top.

This is not so much a recipe as a food idea. A lot of Thai food is like this, a very simple river fish grilled to perfection. Catching fish and cooking them next to the river is a fond memory from my childhood.

Ingredients
2-4 Padug Fish
Salt

Preparation
1. Clean the fish and score it with 3 diagonal lines, put salt in the cuts.
2. Skewer it on a wooden stick.
3. Grill on a charcoal barbecue.
4. Eat with stick rice on a picnic.