Curried fish pie with a crispy potato top

Ingredients
4 cloves of garlic
1-2 fresh red chillies
groundnut oil
2 small handfuls of curry leaves
1 teaspoons black mustard seeds
1.2 kg Maris Piper potatoes
2 large free-range eggs
1 small knob of unsalted butter
semi-skimmed milk
2 onions
1 thumb-sized piece of ginger
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 X 400 g tin of light coconut milk
200 g baby spinach
lemon
4 ripe vine tomatoes
3 x 60g lemon sole fillets, skin off and pin-boned
150 g haddock, or ray fillets, skin off and pin-boned
150 g salmon fillets, skin off and pin-boned
150 g large raw peeled king prawns, deveined

Method
I've done a few fish pies in my time, and very nice they are too, but there's no way I could do this
book without including one, so I was faced with the question of legitimately where I could go that's
different from where I've been before. Well, the answer is India. This comforting curried fish pie has
amazing perfumed layers of flavour that will slap you round the face yet still give you delicate fish
and a crispy potato top. Throw this into the mix at a dinner party and you'll be winning on both the
surprise and the flavour fronts.

Peel the garlic and finely slice with the chilli (seeds and all), then put into a frying pan on a medium-
low heat with a good couple of lugs of oil. Add the curry leaves and mustard seeds and fry gently for
5 minutes, or until the garlic is lightly golden, then remove from the heat and put aside (this is called
a temper).

Peel and roughly chop the potatoes and cook in boiling salted water for 12 to 15 minutes, or until
tender. Boil the eggs in the same pan for the first 7 minutes too, then remove them to cold water.
Once cooked, drain the potatoes and mash really well with the butter, a few splashes of milk and a
pinch of sea salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, peel and finely chop the onions and ginger and scrape into a heavy-bottomed pan with
half the temper, the fenugreek and turmeric. Cook on a medium heat for 5 minutes, stirring regularly.
Pour in the coconut milk, tear in the spinach and finely grate in the lemon zest. Bring to the boil,
removing from the heat once the spinach has wilted and the sauce has thickened. Transfer to a nice
high-sided baking dish (28cm square). Roughly chop and scatter over the tomatoes, then leave to
cool.

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/gas 4. Peel and quarter the eggs, then dot over and poke them into
the sauce. Cut all the fish into bite-sized chunks, and intersperse around the dish with the prawns.
Top with your mash go rustic and scuff it up with a fork or, as this dish is a bit more elegant, go 80s
retro-style and pipe it on with a star-shaped nozzle (it creates a larger surface area and looks and
eats very well). Bake for 40 minutes, or until golden and bubbling at the edges. Reheat the remaining
temper with a splash of oil just before serving, and spoon over the top to finish.