More Pictures to Whet Your Appetite II

Tools You May Want

The tools used to carve vegetables are fairly simple and inexpensive. Although you can spend about $130 on a full set of Asian carving tools like I did you can get by on just a couple of garnishing tools and a good paring knife.

The paring knife is important and you will need a good one with a strong but thin sharp blade that retains it's edge well. For my tastes this means a German, Swiss or good Japanese brand. A knife with a 3 to 4 inch blade would work well. Another useful knife is the bird's beak knife which looks like this.

Other useful tools include scoops for hollowing squash, pumpkins and calabash to make bowls and vases etc. Melon ballers are very useful for different things and garnishing tools like channel knives and V shaped vegetable decorating tools are very handy. There is a handy list of items available at Amazon.com to the right of this column, there are various tools available there as well as in many other places both on the web and in physical stores. This is by no means a complete list, there is tons of other things available in all of these places. You may well have some useful tools already around your kitchen that you can use to get started.

 

This last item is a set of useful tools also available, look for garnishing tool sets to find this.

More Pictures to Whet Your Appetite

People Eat With Their Eyes First

I have said this a million times if I have said it once. If food is presented well, if it looks exciting, attractive and colorful folks will naturally find it appealing and appetizing. They will quickly perceive the food offered as fresh and tasty, dive in and enjoy every mouthful. I have worked in numerous levels of the professional food arena, especially areas where often times budgets are very tight. Frequently we could not afford to purchase crystal bowls, silver platters or other expensive containers for salads and other items so I carved bowls out of pumpkins and calabash squash. Tables were decorated by vases of flowers carved from turnips, radishes, scallions and other vegetables that we had in stock in the kitchen. I had no experience at this. It was not taught at school when I attended culinary school in England and most chefs just don't have the time to teach younger people how to do this sort of thing even if they do know themselves. So I winged it. So can you! This is the point of this blog. To inspire you to try it out for yourself. I cannot aspire to teach you how to do this. Techniques are perfected by trial, error and practice. I can and will give you some tips here and there and I can show you the tools I used and guide you towards some books on the subject but it would be up to you to give it a go and practice until the skills become natural, which should happen quickly enough. I am no great expert at this and there are many people, especially some Asian people, who have skills that are totally fantastic. There are many books that will show you the work of these folks and inspire you. I only hope to get you interested so that maybe you'll go out and look for these books and more information. There are many great books on this subject at Amazon and a few can be found in my recommendation widget to the left of these posts and many many more can be found by searching the web in general. All of the photos on this blog depict work that I did for various events over a number of years, of it was very well received at the time and proved to be time well spent. My next post will contain more pictures to get your "appetite" going........