Fish and Lemon Grass Skewers with Coconut Salad / Fisch-Zitronengras-Spieße mit Kokosgemüse

We really had our hopes high that this would become a very special and exotic dish - it looked great and it sounded great. In reality, it was quite okay though not as special as we had hoped. The recipe, however, really had quite a few severe faults.

First of all: Lemon grass. We didn't taste the lemon grass at all, but I sure know we paid more than 5 Euro - all just for visual presentation! Gee, couldn't they have mentioned that? I can only be glad I found them at the shop around the corner, just imagine I had gone into town just for this stupid little item! And so much money for a little non-reusable decoration! Sheesh.

Second: We thought the effort would be reasonable. It wasn't. The biggest problem was cutting all the ingredients for the coconut salad into tiny pieces. Luckily, I was out shopping and DH did all the work (ha!).

The coconut salad ended up being quite nice, but not particularly impressive. The fish cakes (that's what they actually were), in comparison, were, well, quite okay but seemed a waste of all the flavours we put into them - were did they go? Also, you really needed to be careful not to let the fish cakes dry out.

If you really want impressive fish cakes, have a look at the Good Luck Fish Cake, or even the quite reasonable Crushed Pea Fish Cakes with Chilli Lime Mayo from BBC Good Food magazine and website - though both dishes are very different in style.