Four fat fishcakes, frying in a pan

After a couple of weeks of social distancing, we are now officially self-isolating. Smaller child has been poorly for the last couple of days, as small children often are, and since we can't know what's causing the temperature, we are all at home for the next 14 days.
No nature walks in the park, no trips to the shops. I've been trying to keep things fairly well stocked for the last few weeks, and we are lucky already to have some regular deliveries (as per my last post), but the grotty child symptoms came on the day before we had planned to go and pick up a few things from the supermarket, so we're low on a few regular items. Thankfully a lovely local friend will be dropping off some bits tomorrow, but I am definitely now meal-planning in a way that my haphazard throw-it-all-in-a-pan-and-hope-for-the-best style (also as per last post) does not usually support. Planning meals till after Easter is also motivating me to use up the final #ArchivedIngredients at the back of the cupboard and get experimental. Last night's mission was to use up a tub of shop-bought breadcrumbs which I found at the back of the cupboard, well past their best-before date. I have never knowingly bought pre-made breadcrumbs, so god knows where they came from. Maybe my husband, on one of his roughly annual yearnings for chicken kievs...? (He harbours a grudge against me for the lack of meat in our diet and occasionally goes all out if we have people staying - which already seems a strange long-ago concept).
Anyway, breadcrumbs are for coating things, and there was a handful of small elderly potatoes in my veg bowl, so I decided on fishcakes, made with some smoked haddock fillets from the freezer, some rather tired spinach. The recipe was roughly this, so I won't expand on it in detail.

The tatties have eyes

But I only had about half the necessary potatoes I needed something else to bulk out the fishcakes, and I here I must thank the marvellous, ingenious, and generous Bootstrap Cook (who is doing her bit at the moment with #JackMonroesLockdownLarder), for the tip I picked up a couple of months ago to keep packet stuffing in the cupboard. She suggests it to thicken soups, top pasta bakes etc, and why not, I thought, for fishcakes? I added a bit of boiling water to about half a pack and then mixed into the fishcake ingredients before coating and frying.

One fat fishcake

The sage and onion flavour actually worked really well with the haddock, and wasn't even too weird with the tomato salad and dressed (frozen) green beans that I served it with. I may even attempt this again when life, and grocery shopping, hopefully assumes some kind of normality again.