We've been buying previously frozen Ahi tuna, which is about 2/3 the price of fresh Ahi tuna, and then I marinate it for 30 minutes in a mixture of soy sauce, wasabi, fresh (or pickled) ginger, and toasted sesame seed oil. I grill this the way I would fresh tuna, and I heat the leftover marinade (with a bit of cornstarch) to make a sauce.

I will also buy frozen or previously frozen salmon and make salmon cakes (or croquettes) with it. Marilyn's recipe works well for this.

Packs of frozen smoked salmon trimmings pack a big flavour punch in pastas, quiches, fishcakes etc. You don’t need much to get the taste and they're much cheaper than cuts from whole smoked salmon.

Nets of live rope grown mussels are still fairly cheap in season and moules marinères is one of my favourite meals.

I am also a big fan of canned sardines in olive oil. Very nutritious and cheap.

For mackerel I’d always buy fresh and I wouldn’t soak it. I like the big flavour. Being an oily fish I would usually fry, grill or bake it to get the crisp skin. Poaching mackerel is a new idea for me although I have soused it. I might try it if I had less than optimal fish.

Here's another way to get crisp skin on mackerel:

Lars, Marilyn's salmon cakes made with fresh (or previously frozen) salmon is my go to. I don't think you could even compare them to salmon cakes made with canned salmon. I've passed it along to my daughters and it is now their go-to as well. Marilyn had a lot of great recipes.

If the skin doesn't crisp up well enough, I have used my blow torch on occasion.

We eat mostly fried crappie that I catch when down at our lake cabin. It is free unless you count the money spent on my boat, fishing tackle, gas for the boat, beer, etc. If those costs are included it's probably about $50/lb.

We also eat frozen Ahi Tuna that I usually sear in a cast iron pan after marinating in a concoction similar to Lars. My wife loves it when it splatters all over the stove! I will smoke Salmon on occasion but usually I season and grill it in my Weber kettle on a cedar plank.

I know nothing about fish, but I recently learned this about mackeral :D

https://www.yahoo.com/video/penguins-otters-reject-cheaper-fish-223224013.html

I disagree with those penguins and otters. I love mackerel and will take it over trout any day. We often buy a mackerel for me and a trout for DH for our dinner.

Least expensive I've found is bags of individually frozen wild caught salmon fillets at Aldi. They're kind of thin, and cook quickly. I usually just broil them without thawing. And I really like dredging the thawed pieces in seasoned cornmeal and frying in butter and olive oil.

Also very low priced are the smoked sardines at Trader Joe's, and Starkist canned chunk salmon - I just had a salmon salad sandwich for lunch 🙂

Floral, maybe you prefer baby food? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hek2tvVVCo&ab_channel=AquariumofthePacific

The poached mackeral is interesting— I normally only poach salmon. I do buy smoked peppered mackerel. i love a summer salad that includes some bitter greens, smoked fish, and sliced local peaches or nectarines.

Go fishing.

John! glad to see you again. I love tinker mackerel and used to catch it.

Every year I promise myself that I am going to go mackerel fishing. I’d like to try fishing to striped bass as well. I am over an hour from the coast — dammit. not my idea.

As the pandemic loomed, I stocked up on my favorite tinned sardines — king Oscar double layer pack. Sometimes that’s my dinner — good sardines packed in olive oil on a cracker. I like salt water fish.

DH went out fishing yesterday over high tide and caught a bluefish on the bay. We prefer striped bass or cod, but they aren't as easy to come by. We gave half of it to our neighbor, and cooked half for ourselves...

Yum, seagrass, that looks delicious.

I also like mackeral better than I like trout, I mostly will only eat trout smoked.

We do have a pond, which we have stocked with bass, perch, bluegill and catfish. We have just started catching and eating them because we bought fingerlings a few years ago and were waiting for them to grow and repopulate. We did spend $300 buying the fingerlings, but it won't take too many meals to make that back!

No boat necessary, Jack, the kids fish from the banks of the pond. No boat means no gas, and kids don't drink beer, LOL.

Annie

Annie, you remind me of Summers on family friends' ranch when I was a kid. He, the rancher, trained the fish in his pond. Every so often he'd clomp out on a little dock-like platform and throw a couple of handfuls of fish food in the water. The fish learned that clomping meant a treat. And on fish dinner night, he'd look over the selection of "volunteers" and scoop out his choice with a net. :) My father was a (amateur) fisherman. His friend was an engineer. :)

John, I find your thread interesting, learning things, but I figured I should look at what the prices actually are, and found Portland Fish Market online. The only "reasonable" price for what I think is fresh caught from wild is rockfish. Makes me feel better about what I spend on meat. My father caught a lot of rockfish, but I don't know how it was cooked. Have you considered angling?

As a child of a family of men who seemed to always have their p[ants rolled up and rod in their hand casting into the surf, I love whatever they catch. Usually snapper or striper, sometimes flounder snf occsadionslly a full grown blue.

Then I married a flatlander and learned to love Crappie and bass and especially walleye and perch and even Northern pike. I learned how to remove most of the 'y" bones.....but still prefer ocean fish. And frankly with most fish the simpler the better....either pan fried in butter with just lemon, or oven baked with butter and lemon, or if it's a good sized fish, baked on a bed of chunked up celery and onion

Last night I fed two of us on a single 120gr can of sardines. The trick was croquettes. Used the oil from the can to make the roux. Also used up some stale bread and a bit of old dried up cheese for the crumb coating. Served with zucchini from the allotment.

My favorite blufish recipe, seagrasssea grass! the other is to flame it with gin.

I got turned on to "tinned" (canned smoked) mackerel on one of my trips to Great Britain. It made great wraps mixed with some shredded fresh veggies while we were camping in the Lake District. I also buy canned salmon and make salmon patties. I know too much about Atlantic Salmon to buy it fresh or frozen, and fresh wild caught Pacific salmon here in the midwest is very pricey, like go out to dinner once a year pricey. That's why I'm willing to buy the canned, it's a good deal. Hubs and I eat frozen what's on sale and tilapia for our "fatty fish" health buzz, including canned sardines and mackerel. I used to have a line on fresh caught "pan fish" (small perch and bass) but not so much any more. Our Great Lakes specialties of walleye and white fish and Lake perch I can only get when I go out of town . . . sigh. I'm ok with the farm raised catfish

People don't understand that the main reason I became an environmental activist, particularly with regards to water quality, was gastronomical. I've always loved seafood. I just don't understand why we don't value and protect these fabulous resources, but seem content to just exploit them until they are completely gone . . . the sad thing is, for a lot of fish, they are so full of toxins that even if you can fish for them, it's pretty sketchy to eat them. So sad.

I grew up on salmon croquettes made with canned salmon, and also fresh caught fish from our dock. The house is on an inlet of the local bay, near the Gulf of Mexico. I agree a fresh caught and cleaned fish sauteed in butter until crispy is one of the better things in life! And fresh caught and steamed blue crabs are right up there as well. The fish we mostly caught are called grunts. One average sized grunt is perfect as a meal for one.

Some great ideas here. Thank you all for posting. I normally cook fish in oven with some butter and white wine or just butter and lemon.

I have searched for Marilyn's salmon cakes recipe and can't find it. I love salmon, and would love to try the salmon cakes made from the salmon. My daughter makes it, but I am not fond of the recipe she uses. Would someone mind posting Marilyn's recipe for me, please.

It's in this thread:

https://www.gardenweb.com/discussions/2461718/marilyn-s-salmon-cakes-what-kind-of-breadcrumbs#n=6

[In the Gardenweb.com Cooking index of threads, in the search bar at the top of the page, I put in ”Marilyn salmon” and used the ”in cooking” link that comes up. The fewest, most unique words give the best results. Google no longer gives you the best match for your search, but what they think you should want to see, and I think to get a good internal search, you have to be on a Gardenweb address page. I'm stubborn and keep kicking applications until they give me what I think they should. :) ]

Thanks, @plllog, I was putting in too many words. Have to learn to be more concise.

I'm another that lives at the seaside so fish and shellfish everywhere. Last night was mussels cooked in coconut milk flavoured with lemon grass, garlic, ginger, fish sauce, lime juice and fresh coriander.

OK, Islay, convince me to try that over my beloved marinières.