If You Always Do What You've Always Done...Then You'll Always Get What You Always Got

Monday, 3 December 2012

Jamie Oliver's Fish Pie

It's been a long time coming, but I finally made Jamie's fish pie.  While it was very easy, there are some alterations I would make for the next time - different vegetables in the mix, and probably a combination of potato and sweet potato for the topping.  While Jamie says this feeds 4 - 6, I had a good 7 or 8 meals from it.

Ingredients:
1 kg potatoes
1 carrot
2 sticks of celery (this was the first time I bought the separate celery sticks instead of a whole or half)
150g good Cheddar cheese
1 lemon
1/2 a fresh red chilli
4 sprigs of fresh flat-leaf parsley (or some generous handfuls from your parsley plant outside - washed carefully thank you ants and grasshoppers)
fish pack of 700-750g assorted fish and shellfish, or
600g assorted fish from your freezer and
125g king prawns (or prawn meat), raw, peeled
olive oil (I bet you thought I'd forgotten this, right?  But it's a Jamie Oliver recipe!)
optional: a good handful of chopped spinach
optional: a couple of ripe tomatoes, quartered
(I didn't use either of the optionals)

To prepare:
Preheat oven to 200C and bring a large pan of salted water to boil.  Peel the potatoes and cut into 2cm chunks.  Once the water is boiling, add potatoes and cook for around 12 minutes, until soft.  Soft, but don't get distracted like I did and burn the bottom of them... Salvaged, thankfully, but still.
Meanwhile, get a deep baking tray or earthenware dish and stand a box grater in it.  Peel the carrot.  Grate the celery (weird, but there you go), carrot and Cheddar on the coarse side of the grater.  Use the fine side of the grater to grate the zest from the lemon.  Finely grate or chop your chilli (and, I guess, add it to the pan).  Finely chop the parsley leaves and stalks and add these to the tray.

To cook:
Cut the fish into bite-size chunks and add to the tray with the prawns.  Squeeze over the juice from the zested lemon, drizzle with olive oil and add a good pinch of salt and pepper.  If you're adding any optionals, do so now.  Mix everything together really well.  By now your potatoes should be cooked (or slightly over-cooked if you haven't been paying attention), drain them in a colander then return them to the pan.  Drizzle with a couple of good lugs of olive oil (yes! he said it!) and add a pinch of salt and pepper.  Mash until nice and smooth, then spread evenly over the top of the fish mix.  (I didn't actually weigh the potatoes, so they didn't quite cover the fish - I put some foil on top instead to keep the seal factor happening).  Place the tray in the oven for around 40 minutes, or until cooked through, crispy and golden on top.  (Mine was cooked through but not as crispy or golden as I imagined it would be).  Serve piping hot with tomato ketchup, baked beans, steamed veg or a lovely green salad.

I apologise for the photos.  By the time this was ready we were really super hungry so photo composition was not a priority.

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