Foodie 5: College Cooking, Fish Friday

This quarter I wanted to get away from having pasta on the weekend. Don't get me wrong, I make a good pasta (in my humble opinion), but I realized at the end of this summer that I have never cooked fish before. I hadn't even eaten any fish that someone else cooked the whole time I've been at Cal Poly. So when I made my weekly menu, I turned regular ol' Friday into Fish Friday.

Spicy Breaded & Baked Cod with Garlic & Butter Asparagus

Let's get an opinion, shall we?

Troy "Jesse, if there was one thing you could change about this meal, what would it be?"
Jesse: "Hold on, I haven't tasted the fish yet. I'm still eating my asparagus." *

Okay, so Jesse likes to eat things one at a time. We'll let him finish and then come back to him. In the meantime, let me discuss the recipes I worked from.

Now, mind you, I don't follow a recipe 100%, especially not if I'm in experimentation mode. In fact, most of the time I cook from the gut, but since I've never cooked fish before, I needed some temperature and time parameters to compare against. For the fish, I used this recipe, and for the asparagus, I used this recipe.

Fish Modifications:
Everything else was the same except for the following:

• Instead of croutons, I used bread crumbs from Trader Joe's
• I omitted the Parmesan cheese, as much as I would have liked to include it
• Instead of paprika, I used Kay's Best Spicy Garlic Seasoning (
• I substituted lime juice for the lemon juice

Asparagus Modifications:

I actually followed this recipe almost exactly. The only thing I changed was to add a fourth clove of garlic. I also let the garlic get a bit crispy near the end.

Peer Review:

Okay, back to Jesse.

Jesse: ~takes a bite of the fish~ "Okay. First, I liked the asparagus. The first... is spicy. It's quite sudden. But overall its good. Especially with the lime juice on top."

There you go. A peer reviewed recipe! Enjoy.

*Quotes are paraphrased, but accurate enough to portray the sense of the conversation.