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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Enough with the beetles berries and the bugs, here's simple clean river fish grilled with a salt crust and lemon grass stuffing for flavouring.

Ingredients
1-2 Pla-Nin Fish ( Approx 500 gms each )
4-6 Lemon Grass
3-4 Tablespoon Crystal Salt

Preparation
1. Gut and scale the fish (ito scale a fish hold it by the tail and scrape the knife against the scales to scrape them off).
2. Stuff the lemon grass into the center of the fish.
3. Rub the salt into the outside of the fish.
4. Grill the fish on the barbecue until cooked.

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.