How do you do your fish pie?

[EqualStevens]

I like a lot of different types of fish - doesn't matter which ones too much but I like to include some prawns, some white fish, some smoked fish and whatever else. Sometimes mussels or cockles or salmon. I poach in 50:50 milk:water then save the poaching liquid to make a sauce thickened with sauce flour and then add fresh chopped parsley, sixthed hard-boiled eggs and peas.

I prefer peas served on the side, but the rest of the family like them in with the sauce. Then I top with a THIN layer of mashed potato (mashed without butter) and bake. Have never been one to top with cheese.

I tried the Jamie Oliver one which involved grating loads of veg and thought it was AWFUL, but he did another lovely one with a really lemony sauce and spinach in the pie and that was nice.

Nothing like that complicated. The raw fish goes in individual dishes. Parsley sauce poured over. Mash on top. Bake until fish cooked... not long.

Oh I liked the Jamie Oliver one, though I must admit I made it a bit more lemony than he said. It was really fresh and lovely and not at all gloopy as some fish pies can be.

I do mine similar to cogito though not with parsley sauce, just normal bechamel. I could never get anything green past ds (unless it was a pea)

Jamie Oliver's fabulous fish pie for one of his earlier books is to die for and not overly complicated.

I alwyas make the Jamie Oliver one! Easiest and leats messy but tastes great. I do hate grating the veg for it though. I add extra lemon & add spinach liek he recommends. My kids all scoff it.

I make mine the same as you make yours op but none of my family like it :(

I tried the JO one from MOF, it was grim.

I use white and smoked fish. DS and I like salmon too, but DH doesn't and last time I added some, somehow he ended up with most of it! I cook the fish forst though - does it work OK with the fish from raw?

If I am short of time, I buy ready made parsley sauce and mash from sainsburys!

first!!

I do the same as you Equal although I will put some cheese on top occasionally. The whole family loves it - it gets eaten in silence usually with a few mmmmms or DD (18 months) piping up with "my yummy" every so often.

I make mine the same as you Equal but I also include sliced hard boiled egg between the fish and the mash. Yum!

I make Levi Roots caribbean fish pie. Mixed fish, lime juice, coconut milk and spinach and corriander ,mixed into a white sauce with sweet potato mash on top.

that sounds delicious!

I cook the fish (white, smoked haddock and salmon) in 100ml of fish stock in a frying pan or wok, then stir in a tub of soft cheese with garlic and herbs, transfer that to pie dish, top with mustard mash. In the oven for 30 mins. Yummy.

I've never heard of putting eggs in it! Really not sure about that.

Mine is similar to yours Equal, cept I use full milk, with peppercorns and cinamon in it. And plenty of mash on it!

ooh I like the sound of the levi roots one. Maybe even dh would eat that one.

traditional fish pie needs eggs!

I bet the Levi roots one is amazing. I had mussels cooked with scotch bonnet chillies, allspice and coconut milk from one of his books at a dinner party once and they were amazing.

I use waitrose fish pie mix which is 1/3 white, 1/3 smoked white and 1/3 salmon all chopped up ready to use. I bring milk to nearly boiling with the fish in it, so as to get flavour into the milk, which I then use to make a white sauce. DH likes a cheese sauce so sometimes I do that. Mix fish and sauce, top with mash, pop in oven til brown. Yummy and we all like it.

I also add hard boiled eggs, plus capers. It was originally a Delia (How to Cook) recipe that we've bastardised over the years. It's the absolute favourite tea in this house.

Hello - capers would be amazing! That's what I'm going to do tonight! YUM.

"does it work OK with the fish from raw?"

Yes. The sauce is cooked, the potatoes are cooked and raw fish chunks only take 15-20 minutes to gently cook through as the sauce and the potatoes get nice and hot.

Smoked oysters. They come in tins and are amazing in a fish pie. I think it's an Ottolengi (sp?) tip

I swear I was going to start the exact same thread - I thought about it last night when I was cooking one myself!

Anyway, I do mine in a similar way to anthonytrollope although I generally use the packs of frozen fish pie mix from Morissons. They cost £3 a pop, and one feeds the three of us (ds - 11, dp and me), despite looking too small.

I cook the fish from frozen in a pint of whole milk, with a bay leaf, a stick of celery if I have any, a couple of peppercorns and a slice of onion with some cloves stuck in it. It really is just until the fish is no longer frozen and is warmed through. I strain this into a small saucepan then discard the aromatics (ie the celery, bay etc) and put the fish in an oven dish with a handful of frozen prawns and a couple of chopped hardboiled eggs (which not only taste good, but they stretch out the fish iyswim).

I wipe out the pan I used to heat the milk, melt a large knob of butter in it (maybe a tablespoon) then add flour (a tablespoon maybe?) to make a roux, then the milk to make that up into a white sauce. Sometimes I had a handful of grated cheese, often a tiny bit of English mustard powder. This then goes over the fish, eggs and prawns.

I top that with a thin layer of mash, dabbed with a little butter. Then it goes into the oven for 30 minutes or so. It generally turns out perfectly nice, in a home food kinda way.

Another fairly frugal fish dish I tried the other day was this. Rather than boil and mash the potatoes I baked a couple in the microwave and scooped out the flesh; enough to equal the weight of the smoked mackerel. I didn't have any chickpeas or edmame beans so used a tin of cannellini beans instead. Twas lush.

ruby that MPW recipe looks lovely. Far more refined than the JMHPG version

Oh, that smoked mackerel fishcakes recipe fed the three of us, with a bit of the bean salad leftover.

Thanks cogito. I usually steam my fish or poach in milk (if I am making sauce from scratch) but will try from raw next time.
If I need to eke my fish out, I will tuck some prawns "in" when inserted for dh and ds, and I have a harboiled egg on the side.