hello Watson

So remember a couple of weeks ago I told you about Chef Watson? About 150 of us are now working with CW (I use the term ‘working’ very loosely in my case as this is very entertaining and I really don’t have a clue what I’m doing!), and last night s/he helped me create my first recipe. My veggie box arrived with all kinds of things to choose from, so CW and I had a lot to work with. I had some Cod in the fridge, a bag of roma tomatoes that I had planned to turn into ketchup but never did, the basil on my deck needed trimming and there were some shishito peppers in my box, so that was my start. Although CW didn’t know what a shishito pepper was, so subsituted chipotle pepper and green chiles, which I completely ignored.

Before beginning I plugged in some random ingredients to see what would come back and was extremely amused. CW is a work in progress and outputs things like ‘serve with raw chicken‘ and ‘spray pan with nonstick chili pepper‘. But what is great about this whole thing is the very odd combinations that CW pops out that seem to be working for many of the cooks involved. Someone posted a crostini recipe using strawberries and pepper that looked amazing. And I pulled up a recipe for an orange and mozzarella souffle that I’ll try soon.

But back to my recipe. Below is what CW gave me when I plugged in the ingredients listed above and the method ‘roasted’.

And here are my modifications:

The results

The garlic didn’t cook through, so next time I think I’d roast the garlic first and squeeze it into the slits in the fish to see how that worked, and put the rest of the garlic in the sauce on the stove. The shishito peppers are a bit too tame for this dish, so I’d try hotter peppers next time and perhaps even roast them first. But overall the dish was good if a bit bland, the fish was cooked perfectly and it was sure pretty! I served it with a salad of curly green lettuce and kale that I massaged in mustard and lemon dressing. The salad was awesome. Now as you know I’m just a home cook, no chef by any means, so I’m open to your suggestions and criticism….any thoughts? Don’t be shy.