"garnish" news and stories

A blogger over at the Huffington Post recently found a novel way to discourage restaurant goers from making tableside "lemonade": She argues the penny-pinching practice is as filthy as it is uncouth.

It's a point that bears repeating, if only because heaping scorn on the sugar-and-lemon set has done little to dissuade them. It's an argument that also has the distinct advantage of being true.

I'm not sure exactly when lemon wedges became as obligatory as plates and napkins, but I've never worked in a restaurant that didn't garnish their glasses with them. Server sidework invariably involves slicing a few dozen lemons into half-pinwheels, a process that's almost always messy.

Remember those beginner knife skills we learned last week? That was just step one, friends.

Now it's time to get a little more crafty with that blade and morph food into edible garnishes that are artistic triumphs. The video above, courtesy of Howcast, details how to turn produce and chocolate into veritable sculptures.

In a "Wallace & Gromit"-style video, we are shown a few of the super-quick, super-easy ways to make things look snazzier -- orange-wrapped cherries skewered with a toothpick for a cocktail, tiny mushroom curls, a quick tomato skin rose and even sinfully delicious curls of chocolate perfect for a bowl of ice cream.

When food art is this easy, how can you resist?

Whenever someone mentioned edible flowers to me, whether as part of a dish or used as a garnish, I nodded politely and did not think much of it. I considered edible flowers to be among the items that one can only find at a store with hard-to-find specialty ingredients - ingredients that I would probably never use, let alone actually need. This week, however, I spotted bags of hibiscus flowers at Trader Joe's.

Sold alongside the other dried fruits, the hibiscus flowers are dried and lightly sweetened. Apart from their beautiful dark fuchsiacolor, they taste pretty good. Slightly sweet and chewy, like fruit leather, they have a bit of a vegetal undertone that is not present in most dried fruits. I think that they'd make an attractive garnish for cakes and even a nice, unusual addition to a spring-time salad. They are not, however, something that I would eat by the handful.

[Photo by Nicole Weston]

Virtually every chef and food-related resource extols the virtues of using freshly-shaved spices to flavor your cooking. Grate some nutmeg. Grind some cardamom. The flavors are brighter and stronger when they are fresh. But what about freshly grated chocolate? It's true that the flavor won't get stronger, but it sure does look cool.

The Chocolate Mill grinds chocolate chips of any flavor - dark, milk or white - into chocolate shavings with a turn if its handle. Not only is it a unique kitchen gadget for the cook-who-has-everything, it can improve presentation of a piece of cake, garnish an ice cream sundae and top a frothy cappuccino with a bit of extra flavor.