When the Minimalist cooks at home, I bet he doesn’t have to scour the entire town just to find 3 pounds of cod.
Cod Cakes with Ginger and Scallion would have involved much less effort if, well, if it could have been called Tilapia or Pollock Cakes. For some reason (hey, it's Wednesday) my local market was out of cod. I asked the man stocking the frozen fish case if he had any and he said, “Nope. You’ll have to come back in the afternoon when the truck gets in.” As my cod cakes needed to sit in the fridge for a couple of hours firming up, that wasn’t going to work. Off I went to store number 2, dragging my hapless child, where only one 12 oz. package of cod was to be found. Instead of buying it, I plunked it back on the frosty shelf, retrieved my boy from Kool-Aid aisle, and hastily made my way over to store number 3 which had no shortage of “Cod—Product of China”. I generally look for Icelandic Cod, but tonight I’d have to settle for Chinese and hope that the giants of Chinese Industry were not polluting the local waters too terribly.
I poached the cod, a little too long and a little too vigorously (forgot I had a skillet of boiling water on the stove), boiled a couple of baking potatoes, chopped the cilantro, ginger, and chile pepper, and set about assembling the cod cakes.
As mentioned by Athena, in one of my comments, the beauty of Bittman’s book is the many options it presents for cooking anything. (For all I know, I could have made Tilapia Cakes and they would have been fine.) I’d doubled the batch and flavored one half of the mixture with ginger and cilantro, and the other half with cilantro, scallion, and a tiny amount of the chile pepper. After forming hamburger-like patties, I stuck the cod cakes in the fridge for a couple of hours before broiling.
It was a good thing I picked up a little filet mignon to broil as well, just in case my husband didn’t seem to thrilled about cod cakes. My first efforts here turned out rather disastrously. Bittman instructed me to broil the cakes until nicely browned, but while checking on them, somehow, the baking sheet slipped or flipped and I ended up with a heaping mass of squashed-together, soggy, cod cake, half of which spattered all over the floor of the oven. Oh, I remember: it was the slightly wet hand underneath the oven mit that caused the disaster and the several deleted expletives.
Kipp and I ate the squashy stuff, since it was still tasty. I much preferred the scallion/ red pepper version to the ginger. I might as well have broiled ginger alone—that’s how much the flavor dominated the fish, and though I like ginger, preferably in snaps, this time it was way, way too overpowering.
I had plenty of cod cakes left, and was determined to get them to come out right, so after suppper, I fired up the broiler again. I had used up all my cookie sheets throughout the course of the day, so I pre-heated a flat, rectangular, two-burner griddle and plopped an oiled cod cake onto that. I made sure to get the top nice and brown—and lo and behold, when I flipped the cod cake, it was already brown on the bottom too. On the cookie sheet, the bottom of the cod cake was a white as a fish belly when I flipped it. The griddle must have been much better at conducting heat. If I wasn’t so lazy at washing my dishes or so impatient to try again, I wouldn’t have discovered this little trick, which led to a lovely, crispy-on-the-outside, tender and flavorful in the middle, cod cake with scallion.
I’m hoping to freeze some of these and keep them in the fridge in lieu of any sort of processed fish stick. Because the cakes are bound with the mashed potato, there isn’t any reason to cook a separate starch; the cakes, along with vegetables, salad, and tartar sauce make the meal. Filet mignon is optional--but recommended to save marriages.
1:17:49 AM 
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