Recipe that I want to share with you now is a beautiful version of a fish pie. It's thrifty
and it's delicious and I call it sweet pea fish pie it's so good. It's heroing most of the
ingredients from over there, the freezer. Things like vegetables are amazing in the freezer. I'm
using spinach and peas and then fish. You can have it sitting there in the freezer waiting for you to
cook something delicious with it and there's many methods of cooking, especially when it's in a nice
sauce or it's kind of baked where frozen fish really can be fantastic and as long as you get
something nice and sustainable you're laughing. So I have 300 grams of salmon and 300 grams of white
fish and if you look in the freezer aisles you'll see some really good frozen fish. So in a pan we
go, and I'll cover that with 500 ml of milk and I'll just simmer it to poach it until it flakes,
so about 10 minutes. So this recipe is great at kind of swapping in different fish and making do
and stretching fish a long way. Now, what I want to do is show you how I make the most delicious
mashed potato topping. I've got a kilo of potatoes that I've peeled, just cut into chunks boiling
away for about 15 minutes, and then we're going to use the second freezer ingredient and that's
400 grams of frozen peas okay so just put them in there for a minute, happy days. These can go back
in the freezer. That's the great thing about the freezer isn't it just use what you need,
straight back in there. I'll drain it straight away, so over we go to the sink.
So in this pan here we're going to make the most amazing cheesy sauce, full of the good stuff.
I've got two onions finely chopped and two carrots finely chopped. Just in a little bit of olive oil
and I've let those slowly fry for like 10 minutes just to soften. So what I want to do now is to
thicken the sauce, 60 grams of flour goes into that pan and then mustard, another store cupboard
ingredient. I like a good teaspoon. It's not hot you just get a nice flavour from it. Stir it in.
And then the liquid that we need is going to come from there, the poaching liquor. So I'll just take
a little spoon, nick a little bit of that milk, just steal a little bit of that liquid like that
and mix it around. So the fish has already flavoured the milk which is all going to add to
the flavour of the whole dish. As it absorbs the milk then we get the spoon and take a bit more.
And it makes the most delicious sauce. You can see it thickening up and it smells amazing already the
colour from the mustard is very very good. And that last little bit of milk like that. You can
see here if I show you the fish, can you see how lovely this salmon will just poach look it's just
falling apart, really nice, gorgeous. I absolutely love good quality frozen fish it's handy. Can you
see how lovely this sauce looks it's really, really good. So the third frozen ingredient
is frozen spinach. 100 grams go in. And again frozen spinach is so brilliant to have in the
freezer it's particularly good for soups, in stews for the last kind of half an hour really nice,
amazing in curries, amazing in curries. And if you think about it the amount of spinach in this bag
would be like a pillowcase worth right? Because it's all been blanched and it's been squashed into
these little kind of pellets and if you just put it straight in a hot sauce like this it
starts to melt and then you get spinach flavoured sauce which is going to be absolutely gorgeous.
So look the nice thing about this recipe is you can use whatever fish you can get your hands on,
fresh or frozen, but I just think frozen fish is brilliant if you use it in the right way and in a
dish like this it's the perfect way. Now a little optional extra to give it real delicious flavour,
cheese. So a nice little grating of cheddar cheese I think is really really good but literally use
what you've got to hand. You can use it almost like a seasoning. So, sort of 40-50 grams. Look
at that. So next up lemon juice. Just half a lemon going in there. I think it's delicious.
So if you haven't got lemon that's fine, but just a little squeeze of lemon like that just lifts,
just lifts the whole story I love it. So the sauce is now done. I'll have a little taste.
Mm! Delicious, so good. A little salt and a nice little hit of pepper but good to check
your seasoning. You can see here with the fish we can just break it up into chunks like that and
we can just get that in and of course if you had different fish that's fine. You can duck and dive
and I think these times that's what it's about right being flexible, being agile in your recipes,
and you know you want to kind of be able to do good cooking no matter what. So look that
looks incredible, let's do the topping because I think this is one of the best bits and actually as
far as my kids are concerned right it's all about the potatoes and the peas. So let's get a masher.
Let's get a nice knob of butter.
Pinch of salt and pepper and then have a good old mashup.
Just keep rattling away and then we'll put it on top. I mean for me for all the parents up and down
the country always trying to get more veggies into their kids you know this is a good way,
but it's also blooming good for the adults too. So what I tend to do is just take
a little bit of our topping and lay it on the top like this. I don't throw it all on
top because you don't want to displace all the lovely sauce. So sort of evenly distribute the
potato here, so here we go. That colour it's just brilliant.
And once you've done that just use the spoon
just to sort of move it around, sort of go up the edges. Look at that.
So you can make it rough and ready you can fork it up you can do nice little turns,
because as this cooks it's gonna go golden and blippy and bubbling and
that lovely sauce is going to find its way out, it's going to be extraordinary and I
can prove it to you because I did one earlier right, check this out. Come on!
Look, look at that. Crispy on the top, all the juices kind of baking their way
out. Let's get that down, let's have a little portion up, come on. Get in
there.
Look at that beautiful chunks of fish absolutely delicious. Really simple
good honest grub you know, stuff that makes you really happy. Come on let's have a little try.
So good.
You would never know that was frozen fish it's so good. It's a clever delicious thrifty dish. In the
freezer the peas spinach and the fish you know, give it an hour or so and you can have this. Joy.