The idea is, you put in ingredients of your choice and type of dish (e.g. Italian, Mexican), the cognitive computing application (Chef Watson) will search through recipes database and create a recipe recommendation for you based on its analysis of food chemistry, which could be different from the conventional cooking methods or ingredients.
So I searched: chicken, potato, broccoli, and it gave me about 5 choices. I found one which I have all/most of the ingredients, and cooked it for dinner. I didn't have saffron, but I decided to skip it.
Here is the recipe for New Year's Day Broccoli Potato Chicken Tagine.
I had no idea what a tagine is, nor did I know if the dish would be edible when I started cooking. See, that's what I call have faith and being adventurous.
I followed the recipe. First, I put the chicken, chopped onion, water in my earthen pot. I started to feel uneasy when I put in 1 1/4 tbs ground cardamon, 3 tsp ground black pepper, 4 tsp ground ginger and 1/2 oz of ground cinnamon. That's a lot of spice, I thought. I had no idea how this kind of mixture would taste, and I could totally destroy our dinner.
While the chicken was being cooked with the spice and onion, I chopped potatoes and broccoli. Then I was worried again, as there were a lot of potatoes and broccoli, and my pot wasn't big enough for everything. So I had to transfer the food into a big soup pot. Note, the direction did say: "heavy large pot."
When in doubt, search the internet, right? I looked up tagine online to found this link to another recipe to chicken tagine, and it was a little reassuring. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/melissa-darabian/chicken-tagine-recipe.html
I just let the food cook and followed the recipe the rest of the way. Two hours later, I had my finished product.
When Jack came home, he wasn't pleased to know that I cooked a dish based on Watson's recommendation. For an AI guy as he is, he thinks ChefWatson was bogus. I made brown rice to go with it. The combination could become an unpleasant dinner, and dinner is very important for this household.
"Oh, I'm sure it'll be fine. The food taste pretty good, actually." I said, while promised to keep ChefWatson's creativity off the Thanksgiving dinner menu.
My dish came out better than I expected. I was happy to have made this totally foreign dish and enjoyed the wholesome spice. In addition, most of the ingredients are cancer fighting: cardamom, chicken, broccoli, ginger, pepper.
If I were to cook it again, I would make the following modifications:
- chop potato in large pieces.
- since boneless chicken is used, I can shorten the cooking time.
- broccoli can be put in later so it's not overcooked.
- broccoli can be replaced by Brussels sprouts, or even add daikon. I like daikon.
- use ground cardamon instead of whole cardamon to avoid the cardamon seeds.
All in all it was a pleasant experience.
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