Eat With Your Eyes, First

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

Have you even wondered why diners always serve an orange wedge and a curly parsley sprig with every plate of scrambled eggs and hash browns? It is because even the lowliest dump of a diner understands that the customer starts eating before the food even touches the fork. And that orange slice will go a long way toward making the customer separate the omelet in front of them from the everyday omelet they make at home.

It is not so much about the orange and the parsley itself, as what a little visual appeal can do to improve a plate, and by extension, a meal. A plate of eggs and potatoes by itself looks at best, yellow and brown, at worst, like a dingy, muddled pile of stuff. The orange and the parsley add both texture and color contrast to an otherwise monotone plate.

Making the food look good might seem like something best left to the restaurants. But the fact is that garnish and design don’t take a lot of effort to make happen. Following some simple ideas to spruce up that otherwise routine dinner plate is going to make your husband or wife, and maybe even your kids, just a little more excited about the plate in front of them.

Create Color Contrast: My dear sister recently cooked a dinner for my parents that included such mud colored ingredients as mushrooms and black beans. The resulting look of the dish was compared to something too foul to write on this page. Even if it had tasted good, my parents had judged that plate by its unpleasant color before the first bite had entered their mouths.

My advice to my sister is that when creating a dish, it is helpful to have ingredients with contrasting colors as well as taste. A sprinkling of chopped parsley or cilantro over the finished dish would at least elevate it from a plain, unpleasant brown. Even a singularly green dish such as a pesto pasta, could be brightened up with a fine dice of tomato or red pepper.

Use Your Leftover Herbs: If you have gone to the trouble to use fresh herbs when cooking dinner, there almost inevitably will be leftovers. Like the diner with its curly parsley, one of the easiest tricks in the book is to use those herbs to spruce up the dish right before service. For example, the 90s were the glory days for rosemary, and restaurants around the country went a little crazy by putting rosemary in everything from roasted red potatoes to grilled salmon. Not only was the dish redolent with the piney taste of rosemary, but perhaps just for a reminder, many a dish came speared with a branch-sized sprig of the leftover herb. That same concept can be applied to almost any dish simply by topping off the finished product with a sprig of cilantro or thyme, leaf of basil, or finely minced chives.

Give it Height: There is nothing more boring than a meal arriving at the table looking like it just emerged from a frozen dinner tray. Meat is in one quadrant, carb in another, lowly vegetable pushed to the side by itself. You can use the element of the dinner plate to prop up and give a little height to the focus of the dish, which is usually the meat.

For instance, if your meal consists of grilled chicken breast and mashed potatoes, start by placing a small pile of mashed potatoes just off center on the plate. Then prop the chicken up against the mashed potato pile so it is slightly on its side with the most attractive side of the chicken facing up. If serving a vegetable, say green beans, tuck them just to the side of chicken and potatoes so they are partly visible but not the focus. If serving a sauce, it would be spooned on the plate, just in front of the chicken. The final composed plate facing the diner would look something like sauce in front, chicken propped up against potatoes, and some green veggies tucked neatly along side. A simple adjustment of positioning the dish from flat-and-boring to tall-and-impressive and, even with food, size does matter.

It does not take a fancy restaurant to make a plate look good to eat. If a diner can do it with parsley and an orange, imagine what your kitchen arsenal can accomplish. Rearrange the plate, garnish it with green, and give the colors some contrast and you might find your family saying “delicious” before the first bite has entered their mouth.

Serves/Makes: 4

• 4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
• salt and pepper

***Rosemary Butter***

• 2 tablespoons butter, room temperature PLUS
• 2 teaspoons butter, at room temperature
• 4 teaspoons minced rosemary

***Garlic Mashed Potatoes***

• 2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and cubed in 1-inch chunks
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled
• 2 tablespoons butter (more if needed)
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 2 tablespoons heavy cream (more if needed)
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 1/4 cup minced chives

***Asparagus***

• 1 pound asparagus, medium thickness, thick ends trimmed
• 2 tablespoons melted butter
• 1 tablespoon minced tarragon
• 1 lemon, zest
• extra rosemary or tarragon sprigs for garnish