Plating your Food

The table is filled with many wonderful delights. Platter and bowl after platter and bowl, the options are endless. They require one, two or three more plate refills. And there you are, a proud and plump member of the “clean plate club”, barely able to move after one of these dinners at the trough!

One of the most effective ways to reduce what you consume is to plate your food, making sure it looks appetizing. High end restaurants know that plate presentation is very important to the overall enjoyment of the meal. Start the meal with a nice dark leafy salad, presented attractively. Be sure that the dressing you serve (whether already on the salad or on the side) is a tasty low-fat, low-calorie variety. It is very easy to make this portion of the meal entirely organic as well. Sit and enjoy the salad. Serving water with the meal is another way to save your calories. We have the tendency to rush through our meals, not sit and enjoy the plate of food in front of us. Your feeling of fullness will be achieved by taking your time.

For the main course plating the food, staging if you will, enhances our overall enjoyment of the meal. Certainly this responsibility falls on the cook but the cook is the person in charge at mealtime. It helps assure that a proper balance of food is consumed. This is especially important when feeding children or when trying to eat a balanced meal while watching the calorie or fat content. The bonus to this is a table that can be dressed with flowers or candles to enhance the eating experience and one that can be cleared easily after the meal.

A dessert course of sorbet or sherbet along with fruit adds an impressive finish to a meal without adding hundreds of calories. Once again, presentation adds exponentially to the overall enjoyment and pleasure we like to experience at our meals.