Salad Brain is a creativity platform.
These exercises use the platter, rather than the typical deep salad bowl, as the canvas for creation and a means to illustrate the universal process of creative thinking and design. No matter the field, the steps of creativity are the same. Here we’re using salads because we all have some experience with salad, a low-stakes, easy medium for practicing everyday creativity. Plus, your installation will feed you beautifully and well, and shouldn’t we all be eating more salads anyway?
We call it PLATTERAL THINKING!
For an introduction to getting in touch with your salad brain, read Welcome to Salad Brain Creativity.
INGREDIENTS:
All colors of plums
Dark red-purple radicchio
green onions
toasted and salted cashews (oops, the photo above doesn’t have the cashews!)
Balsamic vinaigrette–whisk together 3 parts olive oil, 1 part balsamic vinegar, little sugar to taste, salt to taste
PLATTERAL THINKING:
So long summer tomatoes, the plums are here in all colors from black to red to yellow-green to pink. They look terrific and taste very sophisticated when paired with bitter radicchio. Add a slightly sweet balsamic vinaigrette and salty toasted cashews and green onion rings. I resisted adding green and let the yellow-green plums do that work. All that was missing was blue. Thank you blue platter.
The plums are sweet and juicy, some with sour tangy skin. We got everything going here, sweet, juicy, tart, sour, earthy, fatty, salty, savory.
WHAT IF?
Substitute another nut for the cashews. Add something green. How would the look change if you used only one variety of plum? What about arugula instead of the radicchio? I’m thinking about crunchy fennel. Celery?
