Thai style salmon burger with rice

I'm trying to keep to my promise of having Asian influenced food and obviously sharing the results with you. I really wanted to have salmon today and wanted to try something different from the usual steamed salmon. Also, as I am nearly done with my masters and just have a week to go I wanted to make sure that he food will keep me full for quite a few hours so I could concentrate on revision without having to think about food. After a quick search on the internet I finally got an idea - salmon burger. That ticks both of the boxes - salmon with a nice Asian twist.

I have to be honest with you here and confess I've never made nor tried a fish burger so this was something totally new for me. The closest I've come to having a it has been eating fish fingers and to be fair, that's pretty far away. So, I looked through recipes and eliminated the ones which required too many ingredients and which took long time to make. After finding the perfect salmon burger recipe I decided to have it with brown rice and a raw veggie salad and voila - healthy and incredibly filling dish!

I really love the taste of this burger - the ginger and red curry paste add a really nice zing to it. Cooling cucumber and silver sprouts balance out the spiciness and brown rice keeps you full nice and long (feel free to have jasmine rice or some noodles if you wish so). So, all in all - a really nice and very flavourful (maybe even a bit too spicy for some - but I can't objectively describe the spiciness as my tolerance levels have risen considerably after moving to Singapore) dish that is relatively quick to make. The burger itself took less than 10 minutes, but my brown rice took almost 50 to make, so the speed really depends on with what you're having your burger with.

Ingredients

(Serves 1)
- 150g salmon fillet, no skin
- Fresh coriander
- 1/2 tsp soya sauce
- 1 tsp red curry paste
- Root ginger
- 48g brown rice (or other rice or noodles)
- 40g silver sprouts
- 20g carrots
- 30g cucumber
- Lemon, to serve
- Olive oil, for cooking

Directions
Firstly prepare the rice and when there's just 15 minutes left until it's ready, start preparing the fishcake and salad.

For the salad, use a vegetable peeler to make thin carrot and cucumber strips and mix them together with silver sprouts and place on the plate.

To make the burger place the salmon, a small bunch of coriander, soya sauce, curry paste and a tiny bit of ginger (depending on how gingery you like your food) into a food processor and pulse until roughly minced. Heat some olive oil in a pan, make the salmon mixture into a nice burger and fry on both sides for 4-5 minutes until cooked and nicely crispy on the outside.

Place the rice and salmon burger on the plate, decorate with some coriander and a lemon wedge and serve immediately.

Fishcake recipe from BBC Good Food