by the time I served it, it can only be known as what my boyfriend called a “delicious swastika.” However, take a look at this picture below.Īs you can see, I’d already broken rules #1 and #2, and the fig sauce is already starting to bleed. It tasted spectacular, better than I’d expected for my first try at duck. (Wrap a corner of the towel over your finger to create a sharper, paintbrush-size wiping tool.)įor my second dish, I made roasted duck over a hash of sage, pears, potatoes, and onions, drizzled with fig balsamic vinegar. I kept a roll of paper towels handy, to keep as much white space as possible on each plate. While prepping, dressings and sauces spread faster than I’d expected. Lesson #3: Sauces and paper towels go hand-in-hand. (Even better: I had lots of leftovers from my second dish for breakfast.) Once you remove the extra leaves, you see more white, and so the plate looks cleaner, more organized.
MICHAEL PHEW FULL
So I stripped away about half of the leaves, and whittled it down from a full plate to the size of a bird’s nest. To quote Clueless, my dish was a full-on Monet: from far away it’s okay, but up close it’s a big ole mess. It’s harder to focus your eye on what you’re eating when there’s too much to look at. I’m starting to wonder about the virtues of the “green.”Īs I laid out the salad, every ingredient meant less blank canvas (a.k.a. The result: smoky brown, golden yellow, ruby red, and luscious purples.
However, due to the great Edible Flower debacle (see Lesson #4), at the last minute I swapped nasturtiums for frozen strawberries, which thawed out beautifully at the last minute. But for this meal, I had to think like a 30-something New York bachelor: it’s what’s on the outside that counts.įor the first course, I planned on a crunchy salad with lots of color variation, with shreds of bacon and pecans, goat cheese, and edible flowers around a crunchy circle of baked cornbread.
In initially preparing the menu, I thought solely about ingredients, looking for complex flavors and odd combinations. So everything I might present would be done with fingertips, drips from eyedroppers and carefully balanced spoons, and creative slicing…here’s what I learned.įirst step: scrub off any remnants of yesterday’s meal This was just weird enough of a request to make it: I can make fairly good pasta, but can I make it in the shape of the Pantheon? And is my kitchen ready for it? The fanciest equipment I own is a scrub brush shaped like a porcupine. The challenge was to present tasty, good-looking food. I’ve been following this site since I upgraded from an UWS galley kitchen to a place with countertops in Brooklyn, and I’ve always been pretty passionate about cooking, so naturally the first place I thought of was Not Eating Out in New York…įirst, back-story: on my last birthday, my boyfriend presented me a challenge to make a restaurant-caliber meal. Major thanks to Cathy for letting me share the results of this challenge in plating (or lack thereof) with all you super-savvy readers. Lessons of Plating: An elegant self-made dinner in New York
MICHAEL PHEW HOW TO
Today, she’s guest-blogging (a first for NEOINY!) on how to do-up your table, just in time for that romantic summer meal on the patio (that is, roof). After I drew a blank, she graciously took it upon herself to fill that void. Then I received an email from fellow cooking-in aficionado Jessica Freeman-Slade, asking for advice on plating for dummies (or urban-dwelling budgeters, as it were). But if you read between the lines, I really wish I did. Like many of you, I don’t have the space nor the patience to bother with appliances that are used only to improve the appearance of my food, like a piping bag, or one of those ring molds that you watch the Iron Chefs layer parfaits of crisp greens, juicy meat medallions and sauce with. I’ve done some horrible plating in my time.
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