Ugly Food!

Ugly Food! I like to look back at old pictures of food I’ve made because it helps me see how I have improved over time. This has to be one of the ugliest meals I ever served. It looks like a roofer dumped tar in the middle of the plate! Fortunately, just Michael and I were dining that evening.

The food actually tasted good, but we almost wanted a blindfold to eat it. You can’t even tell what it was. There were two filet mignons. On top of the beef was gorgonzola cheese that had been broiled for a short time, with a few chopped scallions thrown on top after the broiling was done. The lump on the right was cauliflower “potatoes” — boiled cauliflower mixed with cream cheese, butter and parmesan cheese in the food processor. The colorful little shards are finely chopped carrots, yellow squash and zucchini that had been grilled in a mesh basket on the grill. The blackish muck is actually the pan juices from the steaks deglazed with balsamic vinegar.

What would I do differently next time? Put the cauliflower on bottom, with a single steak filet on top. (The other filet could have been in the warming drawer, or angled to the side of the first one.) I might have put much less of the balsamic glaze on the plate with the cauliflower and filet on top, hiding all but a small amount of the liquid peeking out from around the edge of the cauliflower and steak. The rest could have gone in a small pitcher. As for the vegetables, they could have been served in a cute little ramekin or been part of the stack. At the very least, they should have been all together. I’ll bet they would have looked great in a radicchio leaf.

Life’s too short to eat ugly food.