Reflections on Ugly Food from 2011

Now that it is 2012, I feel the need to look back at my failed attempts at food that I haven't posted about here. These particular food attempts were for food that tasted okay, but looked dreadful. I know I need to work on my plating and photography skills, but my photography skills will probably become only as good as my point and shoot camera will allow them to be.

Ugly Indian Food
My friend had me over for Vindaloo chicken one evening, and I decided to try and make it for myself using the same store bought Vindaloo curry paste she used. I think I did what she did to make the dish, but my version wasn't nearly as flavorful, and it looked kind of ugly:

Vindaloo curry paste and yogurt marinating the chicken.

Fully assembled dish. Not too bad, but kind of ugly looking.

Same process but with shrimp instead...still not exciting.

Failed plating
I realize my ugly food comes from bad plating, and I tried my hand at plating that made the food look more appetizing. My results were somewhat lackluster. For the eggplant Parmesan below, I think I tried to hard to make the dish look fancy.  I had some left over ricotta cheese from another recipe, and I decided to try and use that as the sticky coating for the eggplant Parmesan. It sort of worked, but it didn't have much flavor. Overall, the eggplant tasted fine, but it wasn't anything to call home about.

Balsamic vinegar drizzles in the lower right hand corner = sad excuse for garnish.

Ugly Tagine Stews
I received the breathtaking tagine below for my birthday one year, and I was excited to write about some of the tagine creations I came up with. 

A tagine is a North African Cooking vessel. I was first introduced to the tagine when one of my undergraduate French professors had our class over to her house for dinner. In French, tagine is a masculine word (le tagine), and my professor always felt it should have been a feminine word (la tagine) because it is a feminine shaped object (it looks like a boob). Perfect logic to me :).

One dish started out good--marinated beef and sweet potato, figs, and onion.

But it ended up looking a little unpalatable. The sweet potato turned to mush, and the spice combination wasn't that exciting. I made too many substitutions, which resulted in a strange flavor combination that was edible, but not repeatable.

In another tagine attempt, I had previously made a really delicious beef stew in my tagine, and I tried to recreate it. This particular beef stew below started out okay, but I wasn't a fan of the rutabaga in the stew below:

For me, the beauty of a tagine cooked meal is that everything is in one pot. You can also take tough cuts of meat, cook it in a tagine on low heat, and it becomes tender and delicious. Because of the long cooking times, the accompaniments to the meat have to hold up, which is probably why the sweet potato I used in the beef and fig tagine above turned to mush. I needed to have added the sweet potato after the beef had cooked for awhile. 2012 will be a time to turn over a new leaf for me and my tagine.