Recipe Contest Update!

For those of you who don’t know, one of our big Octoberfish events this month has been our Get Cookin'! sustainable seafood recipe contest, in which we had contestants send in recipes featuring a recommended fish. Other criteria for the recipes included that they used sustainable/local ingredients and were unique, flavorful, healthy, and easy to prepare.

As part of our “judging” process, we recently held a massive cooking extravaganza at the house of a Food & Water Watch staff member, with the brilliant Chef Joseph “Rocky” Barnette in charge of the operation. We split the cooking/tasting process over two evenings, trying out an array of dishes such as “Idaho Meets the Sea” and the “Hogfish Hoagie” – just to name a few!

While we don’t want to give anything away until the winners are announced, we do have three favorites in the running for the top prize, and overall we were immensely pleased with all of our submissions. They were well-written, easy to make, and showed inventiveness and creativity – all things that make a good recipe, according to Chef Rocky. We were able to buy most of our ingredients at a local market that had all the selections we wanted at very affordable prices, and they tasted incredible. We also put to work our Smart Seafood Guide, using only sustainable seafood in our cooking.

We’ll be voting on our favorite recipe over the next few days, and will notify the winner by October 31st. And for those interested in trying some of these amazing recipes, we will be choosing several to publish in our recipe booklet, which will be available in time for the holidays – as well as an online video of the cooking event, which includes a few tips from Chef Rocky. Stay tuned!

- Sofia Baliño