Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Food as Serving Dishes

This is something that I've always found beautiful. Soup served in a bowl made of bread, or salad served in a bread box or tray. I recently threw a small dinner party for some friends visiting Dubai and made a lemon, mushroom, and chicken risotto as one of the entrées. I sliced the top part off the capsicum (so that the top part looks like a little hat) and a removed the seeds and membrane from inside the larger, hollow part of the capsicum. I then spooned risotto into the capsicum and then covered the top with the part I had cut away. One thing that I found a challenge was finding capsicums that would actually stand on their own. If I'm not mistaken, capsicums usually have four points at the bottom. However, not all capsicums you get at the supermarket are perfect like that. Most had three or three and a half "legs". I had to really search to find some that would stand on their own, and still, I only managed to find around two or three. I then had to improvise and make the risotto-filled capsicums lie down on the dinner plates.

Speaking of improvising, as one of the dishes for dessert, I intended to serve a brownie topped with ice cream and caramel sauce (recipe taken from 50 Fast Desserts- Australian Women's Weekly). I spooned my brownie batter into the rose shaped silicon cases and when they were done, I took them out of the oven. I waited a few minutes for them harden, otherwise the brownies would break. However, when I started removing them from the silicon pans, they broke! My rose shaped brownies were gone! I, being the person that I am, made no attempt to salvage the rest of the brownies and took them out of the pans in any way I could. On the spot, I decided to make a parfait. I layered the broken up pieces of brownies in wide crystal water goblets and placed them with icecream and the caramel sauce that I made. Tasted quite good, albeit better than the stiff-brownie-on-plate-with-icecream.

The menu for that dinner was: tomato soup, risotto, lamb and corn quesadillas, baby potatoes, strawberry jelly with blueberries, and the brownie parfait.

1 comment:

  1. simply awesome. i just love the capsicum idea and using it as a serving plate. i can imagine, how you may find capsicum with four tops, i like the slate serving plates in the same way as they are unique in the same way as well.

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