How to Turn Your Veggies into Edible Art

To a vegetable gardener, few things are more beautiful than your day’s harvest, whether it’s a bowl of green beans or a tray overflowing with tomatoes. Why stop there? If you want to take your admiration for fresh summer produce to the next level, here are a dozen fun ways to turn your veggies into the stars of the plate.

Pretty Vegetable Bundles

One of the easiest ways to showcase green beans, carrots and other veggies that can be cut into long strips is to wrap and tie them, like a present. Consider color when planning combinations of peppers, beans, summer squash, or other vegetables like sweet potatoes, which deliver bold orange color when cut into thin sticks. Once the vegetables are cut and trimmed to uniform size, blanch them in steam for two minutes and cool until they are easy to handle.

Also steam onion, chives or other leaves you plan to use to tie your bundles together. Long, thin strips cut from zucchini with a vegetable peeler make nice wrappers, but they must be steamed to make them soft enough to work with. Once assembled, vegetable bundles benefit from being seasoned, covered and baked until steaming, or to your preferred level of doneness.

With fresh corn in season, only the outer husks need to go straight to the compost pile. The inner husks can be pulled back and tied into rustic handles that give off the aroma of roasting corn whether you cook them in the oven or on the grill. You can also use fresh cornhusks as wrappers for smoking chunks of delicate fish or cheese.

Making Creative Cuts

I’m a reasonably crafty person, but I was humbled in my early attempts to cut cucumbers so they formed fans or hearts, and I’m still a failure with cucumber roses. Granted, I’m a newbie rather than a sushi chef, but I learned some things. American cucumbers are great because of the high contrast between white flesh and dark green rind, but the rinds resist all but the sharpest knives. Thin-skinned English cucumbers are easier to work with but not as showy. I got the best results with little snacking and pickling cucumbers.

While learning to make cucumber hearts, I discovered that the blossom ends of other oblong vegetables, like small zucchini, summer squash or Asian eggplant also make good hearts, or you can use a similar technique to cut them into fans.

To make a vegetable fan, slice the vegetable in half lengthwise. Make a diagonal cut 2 inches (5 cm) from the end, then cut numerous thin slices, keeping the end intact. Use your fingers to spread the pieces into fans.

Creating food art with your vegetables need not be a special project. When you’re constantly paring garden crops for pickling, freezing, drying or big-pot cooking, simply refrigerate promising pieces and cut them when you want to serve crackers with cheese topped with a cucumber heart.

Where I grew up, tomatoes that were hollowed out and filled with tuna salad were a mainstay of summertime ladies’ lunches. It’s still a great dish. You can make a veg version with any pasta or grain salad. To up the eye appeal, cut the tomato into a basket by removing two wedges and hollowing out the middle with a small, sharp knife.

Best Vegetables for Stuffing

Zucchini, peppers and eggplant are fun to fill with savory stuffings made from grains, meats, seafood or cheese. A melon baller is the perfect tool for carving neat hollows in your vegetable boats, or you can use a grapefruit spoon. Be generous when seasoning the filling, which will add flavor to the veggie vessels as they bake until bubbly.

Actually carving vegetables into food art is a respected skill in Thailand and Japan, where it has been practiced for more than 500 years. It’s a refined skill that requires special tools and years of practice, but not always. Night of the Radishes is celebrated on December 23 in Oaxaca, Mexico with gnarled radishes carved into people, scenes and messages. Next time you have an overripe purple eggplant on your hands, expect beginner’s luck as you carve it into a penguin.

Plants Related to this Article

Carrot Grow Guide

Chives Grow Guide

Cucumber Grow Guide