Baltimore-style fishcakes

I like to think I'm pretty good at using up leftovers and I recently decided to make my own fishcakes to use up some leftover mashed potato. I quickly cooked a white fish fillet I had in the freezer, and broke it up in a bowl with the leftover mashed potato

 

 

There was also another reason I wanted to make this or something similar: to try out my new Old Bay Seasoning. My company's head office is in Baltimore, Maryland, and one of my colleagues there came over to the London office recently and bought me this as a gift:

Quite a strange gift, you may think... I had seen a few of these dotted around the office on people's desks and always wondered what it was! Old Bay Seasoning is a blend of herbs and spices made in the Chespeapke Bay area of Maryland, that is popular all over America; my colleague told me that there was once a big factory in Baltimore and everyone entering the city was met with the smell of the spices. It's become such a symbol of Baltimore that tourists often buy a bottle of Old Bay seasoning to take home, so she decided to bring me one as a gift!

Old Bay seasoning is usually used on seafood (Baltimore is on the coast) but can really be used on anything, and is made of a mix of spices including celery salt and paprika. I decided that it would be a good addition to my homemade fishcakes!

After shaping the fish and potato mixture into patties, I added a generous sprinkling of the seasoning, and a little natural yogurt to bind it together, and then dipped each patty in breadcrumbs.



Here they are about to go in the oven

And now just come out!

I think I may have used a little too much of the seasoning (!) but the fishcakes had a really nice flavour. This was a very impromptu dinner to use up leftovers so next time I might see if I can find a recipe to use the Old Bay seasoning... in fact I've just googled it and one recommendation is to sprinkle it on popcorn!

As this recipe uses up leftovers, I'm entering it into Frugal Food Fridays, which I am guest hosting this month on behalf of Helen from Fuss Free Flavours. You can enter anything that's thrifty, uses up leftovers or an ingredient you bought for something else, or uses less energy when cooking.... have a look at the rules (see the first of the two links above) and why not see if you've got anything you can enter this month?