Looks are everything

I admit it. I care, terribly, about appearances. In my opinion, presentation is the second most important aspect of wowing people with the fruits of your kitchen labors. (Taste comes first, obviously). No matter how easy the dish, if it looks elegant on the plate, it will be perceived as more “gourmet,” with better flavor and more preparation time than one with identical ingredients served right out of the baking dish and slopped into a bowl.

Food styling, food plating...you can google these terms and come up with more than you ever imagined existed in the realm of putting dinner on your dishes. Growing up, with five kids, my mother served almost everything out of baking dishes. Since I don’t need that much practicality in my life right now, I like to get a little bit artistic with every meal. Now, I’m not a queen of plating, by any standards, but I wanted to share a couple of examples of what breakfast looks like in our house. Nothing really fancy. After all, it is the most rushed meal of the day.

This is really the only rule I follow when it comes to putting meals out on the table:

Pay attention to colors in both your foods AND dishes.

I like white plates because they don’t compete with my foods; when we married, V- had green plates, which are lovely but tended to make food look blah. I try to plan my meals with plenty of color variation as well. This ensures you’re getting a nutritional meal: if you’re eating a brown or beige themed meal, I can almost guarantee that it’s carb and protein happy with barely a real vegetable in sight (unless you’re big on turnips and cauliflower).

In the first picture (the scrambled eggs and fruit salad), note the ADORABLE fluted bowls we received as a wedding present from my sister. They are so, so, so useful!




Photo #2 is from breakfast today: a simple egg casserole (basically, scrambled eggs poured over some chunky bread crumbs, cheese and some bacon/onion/peppers that had been previously sautéed) and a citrus salad (orange, grapefruit and lime).



I peeled the oranges and grapefruit, sliced them into rounds and squeezed half of the lime over the slices, topping it off with a little honey drizzled over everything. I peeled thin strips from the lime rind in a symmetrical pattern, diced them fine and dumped over the top for a bit of lime zest and extra color. The zested lime, now decoratively striped as a result of the missing peel, perched on the edge of the salad. It took five minutes (the oranges were already peeled as I’d used them for candied orange peel; I just plastic baggied the naked oranges overnight). I’m not sure we would have eaten two oranges and a grapefruit for breakfast if they’d just been sitting in a bowl on the table...this way, we licked the plate clean!

Beyond the pretty quotient, there’s another reason why attractive plating is worth considering. Beautiful food may actually encourage appropriate portion sizes, helping control overeating. I prepare our plates in the kitchen and bring them to the table restaurant-style. Everything is already on the plate and if seconds are desired, we have to get up and serve ourselves from the kitchen. As we’re fairly lazy, it takes a little while to decide whether it’s worth it to get up, which gives our stomachs time to say “Enough! Full!”