The Designer's Dinner
Sometimes, just the colors of foods are enough to satisfy. I was assembling another of my hobo packets, this time using skinless salmon fillets, thinly sliced shallot, yellow peppers and, to satisfy the color wheel, little thin green beans and broccoli with frilly green tops, what my younger brother used to call "trees."
Tucked 'way down underneath was a spoonful of giant Israeli couscous that had been cooked in chicken stock - slippery little pearls soon to be bathed in salmon essence - and sprinkled over the top was a little lemon pepper seasoning.
Color combinations like this delighted me back when I was a florist for several years and they still do, now that I'm designing dinner instead of flower arrangements. Sometimes, I assemble dinner just by how it will look, rather than pairing tastes and scents.
Wrap it all up in parchment paper - which, by the way, was a cosy, satisfying brown - and slide it into a 350 degree oven for 15 minutes (3 minutes too long - it was a little more done than I like) and you've got dinner fit for an artist's palette as well as his palate.
Labels: Hobo Packets, salmon
posted by Zoomie at
5:38 AM
4 Comments:
That's beautiful enough to be a Japanese wood block print - Hiroshige perhaps?
Sometimes that's the photographer's best solution: photo your food before you cook it.
OMG, it's a stunning pic.
We called them trees too :) And sprouts were green ballies!
Nancy, I can just about imagine the whorls in the wood grain in such a print being used to indicate the fish grain and the shallot's layers, but I think Hiroshige was more interested in landscape. :-) He'd have totally gotten the colors, however.
Cookiecrumb, if you cook it right, you don't lose much of the color - sadly, I overcooked the fish so it was paler but the veggies were satisfyingly green still and it's hard to ruin the color of peppers.
Ms Mouse, Green ballies! I'm not sure what my bro would have called Brussels sprouts, as he steadfastly turned up his nose at them, most veggies, in fact. Trees were his favorites.
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