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Speaking Point: Accentuating your food with an appropriate garnish will turn your plates from blah to beautiful. You don’t have to carve elaborate vegetable creations or spend a lot of time to make your plates pop. Here are a few Do It For Less garnishing guidelines:

Speaking Point: All garnishes must be edible.

Speaking Point: Don’t guild the lily. The garnish is there to enhance the food not to compete with it.

Speaking Point: Use a garnish that is relevant for the dish. Take an ingredient from the recipe and use that as your garnish. If your dish has chopped chives in it then decorate the plate with two whole chives arranged in an X shape. Garnish your lemon sole with a wedge or slice of lemon. Try zesting long strings of lemon zest and arranging it in a bundle on top of the fish. Or, quickly deep fry the zest for a crunch garnish for fish.

Speaking Point: You can use edible flowers to decorate your plates such as pansies, roses, lavender, nasturtium and chive blossom. Buy them from the produce section of the grocery store if they are available or, if not use organically grown flowers. Do not use regular flowers from a florist as they are usually sprayed with pesticides.

Speaking Point: Parsley is a great garnish. Finely chopped then dried in paper towels to stop the green color from leaching onto other food, it gives life to mashed potatoes, soups, stews and any bland looking food that needs a life. Use whole sprigs of Italian parsley on the rim of a plate as an easy garnish

Speaking Point: For an Asian flare make a simple green onion curl. Cut the root end off a green onion and trim the leaf end to about three inches. Using scissors or a sharp knife cut through each leaf lengthways leaving about _ inch joined to the onion stem. Place the onion in a bowl of iced water for thirty minutes. The leaves will curl. The longer the onion sits in the water, the tighter the curl will be. This is a great garnish for our Asian Inspiration menu.

Speaking Point: Wow your guests with a simple rose flower. Take a firm tomato and using a sharp paring knife, peel the tomato as if you were peeling an apple. Try to keep the peel as thin and long as possible. Blot the tomato peel with paper towels. Carefully roll up the peel like a coil to make a flower shape.