I have a new plate. Yes a plate. I can’t afford a KitchenAid food mixer. I don’t have the space for a pasta press. I owned a bamboo steamer once but it attracted an unpleasant sheen of greasy dust (or maybe that should read dusty grease) and in the end I chucked it.
I can’t even find the crappy cheese grater we bought at the BBC Good Food Show last year. Not that I want to use it; the only thing it could actually grate was thin air and I can’t find a recipe that requires grated thin air.
Anyway back to my new plate; it’s rectangular and white. I like it. It enables you to present your creation in an orderly manner – i.e. in a row, one thing after another.
With a round plate you tend to have to pile everything up in the middle, or you have to arrange things around the plate and it can quickly end up looking like you just threw the food at the plate and kind of hoped that everything would find it’s natural position all on its own.
Which of course it can’t because it’s all (hopefully) dead, and therefore inanimate.
So that’s why I like my new plate. And nice plates need nice things to put on them – so I went for something simple. Tuna is simple – doesn’t need much doing to it and lends itself nicely to flavours from the Orient…
