Saturday, June 12, 2010

For Your Inspiration - Playing With My Food

Every once in a while I'll be working on dinner and something will strike me, capture my attention. There is such beauty in the mundane world. Color, line, form. If you are looking, seeing, you will find it. This day it was a head of red cabbage.





It's often interesting how the photographs only vaguely capture what my imagination is seeing as I snap the shot. A little fiddling with a digital editing program often can bring the visual images closer to my inner reality.







Who knows what will happen with these images. Ideas float and flow as I imagine how they might be translated into some larger work of art. Perhaps for now this is enough; to simply gather and to play.





If there is a lesson here it is that there is beauty everywhere. Stop. Play. Feed and nourish your creativity. If you want a really great recipe for red cabbage here you go:

5 cups sliced Red Cabbage
1/2 cup dried Cranberries
1/3 cup Rice Vinegar
1/3 cup Sugar
2 tablespoon White Wine Vinegar
2 teaspoons Olive Oil
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
2 1/4 cups sliced Green Apples
1/4 cup chopped toasted Pecans
Combine cabbage and cranberries. Whisk together vinegars, oil, sugar, salt and pepper. Toss with cabbage, cover and chill for 2 hours. Add apples and pecans and serve. I found a wonderful pecan, cranberry, rosemary package at Trader Joe's and it was divine in this slaw.

6 comments:

sonja said...

what a wonderful post of food and art and how the things in our lives and gardens and kitchens have much to teach us if we are present. i often play with my food and and currently captured by the color beauty and stability of a romaine lettuce leaf myself!

Jackie said...

can you please tell me how you did the 4th picture?
I am copying your recipe, it sounds yummy. As always, love your blog

Lyric said...

hmmm. I think in Paint Shop Pro it's a solarize filter - or topography.
I always push the saturation, contrast and brightness first.

I'll see if I can play some more tomorrow and see if I can remember what I did. I usually do so many things that I can't remember exactly how I got to where I end up. (Save a lot of copies along the way - and frequent the "edit - undo" button!)

Lisa Chin said...

I love looking at cabbage. I have some pen and ink drawings of it from an art class I took years ago. Seeing your cabbage photos makes me love it even more. The colors are so beautiful. Your recipe sounds wonderful too! I will have to give it a go. Too bad we don't have TJ's here. :(

Marsha said...

Thanks for the info on the filters used for the 4th picture- I really think using it could come in handy when adapting the photo to an applique quilt...

Diana Trout {Nan.DT@verizon.net} said...

I love this post, Lyric. Food is really beautiful, isn't it? It is why i love chopping veg. thanks,