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Let's think about each ingredient as a different color paint  Remember ROY G BIP?
All artists know you must blend your paint first. You can create natural sunset colors from just using red, yellow, blue and white - the primaries. But if you try to use the red straight out of the tube in a sunset painting, it will be harsh and unrealistic. I still struggle to blend, but it makes a HUGE difference, it makes the colors unique to me.
Same goes for food, a red bell pepper is like using paint straight out of the tube. Now imagine a red bell pepper next to purple cabbage? There is not much tonality, its harsh, not a colorful rainbow vibe and instead feels like a primary and secondary color wheel. But what if you steep the purple cabbage in vinegar first to make more of a magenta color? Magenta next to primary red would be more visually appealing. Or perhaps a pickled red onion "pink" next to orange carrots, now that is pretty :)
Taste, texture, temperature, shape - food has even more dimensionality than a painting. But one must practice impermanence because when it is all eaten, you have nothing to show. It is the act of the creation itself, that is why we do it. And ya know...these days you can snap a pic so its not really gone forever :) Non-attachment.
When it comes to food art, it needs to be practical - truly there is nothing worse than a fru-fru meal meant to show off. We do not want one bite of "food art" on our plate. We eat for satiation. I remember, one time I made a green smoothie bowl and put flowers on it which was just for a vibe. I didn't even want to eat the flowers. Since then, I vowed only to use flowers if it makes sense with the bite.
Which reminds me of a story, we love and adore the late great Anthony Bourdain and always got a kick out of hearing him and chef Marco Pierre White laugh about 5 star, 20 course meals. They say they show up to these restaurants hungry and tired after travel, ask for the 18 course instead of the 25 cause they want to get to bed... and suddenly they notice dessert still has not come and when they ask the waiter what course they are on, "they say ohhhh you are on 28, the chef wanted to bring you extra" lol. And they just face palm and are like please bring me dessert and a check, I am exhausted. They both had a rule from there on out to make a hard stop at X number of courses and to tell the chefs please do not bring extra. They say they dine to "eat" not dine to "dine". You can find that convo here if you want to listen.
But back to collecting inspiration... Nature is the ultimate creative director . Once you get into the world of wild flowers and colors, you start to notice things. Just this morning I saw a little pink flower, I recalled seeing a friend use them in cooking, so I snapped a pic of them and sure enough the plant ID feature on the I-phone told me these are wood sorrels and absolutely edible. Not just edible, they taste like citrus, AND the best part is that it is a shade of magenta that I have never created from ingredients that I would typically use. Then, as I was out for a run, I noticed the distinct yellow flower that grows on the wild bitter melons all throughout Hawaii and thought to myself... I should google if those are edible when I get home. And here is the result "Yes, the bright yellow flowers of the bitter melon vine are edible and used as a seasoning, adding a pleasant aroma and flavor, but the ripe, yellowing fruit itself can become toxic, so only use the young green fruit, leaves, shoots, and flowers, often blanched or cooked in stir-fries". NEW inspo just unlocked. I just added two new flowers into my color bank, simply because I was curious and was thinking about this blog post. Just the act of having the intent to create can spark inspiration. OKAY and on another note, the 5 petal bitter melon flowers are a nice shape. So now you are getting into a whole new dimension of the art - shapes. How you cut your ingredients makes difference. You can make circles from a serrano or long strips. 1 ingredient, multiple shapes.
On my run, I was thinking about this blog post and considered that it might be easier just to make a vlog. We've been wanting to show up for our long form YouTube but I get discouraged when I spend tons of time editing. I love the videos we make, I do not love the amount of effort that goes in. How can we make it effortless? I love how the live streamers just hop on and go, there is no back and forth with tons of edits and B roll overlay. During the fasted, flow state, creative run I was just on, it came to me that I could put all my favorite dishes into a photo folder and just simply "live stream" talking about the inspiration behind ingredients, talk about the travel, where we learned a certain fermentation process, etc. Stay tuned for that if you want to go even further into the weeds of creation with us... I ended up giving it a try, you can watch it here if you are interested.
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