just have to say ...

...that I made the most disgusting looking salad of my life tonight. Taste was great, but looks .... well, it's a good thing no one was coming over for dinner. We were having a Japanese-inspired meal, and so I wanted a simple sesame dressing for the salad. The only sesame in the house, though, was this black sesame paste that is vaguely sweet and hugely popular here. (We're talking PITCH black--every time I open it I remember those days of trying to make black icing for the Halloween cookies in the fall catalog at King Arthur. I was always amazed, and a little disgusted, by how much dye it takes to get icing that black... and really all we needed was this sesame paste.)

So I added some water to thin it out, and some minced ginger, a little rice vinegar, and a little miso. Great. Done. On to the salad. Did it cross my mind at all how this pitch black dressing would look on our beautiful greens? Nope. (And the greens, I must say, are from our farm and are so beautiful. Did you hear that? Our farm! Yes, even here in Hong Kong we managed to find a CSA, and they deliver to our door once a week a bag of the most beautiful, tasty vegetables. Watercress is now in season and it just perks up a salad so nicely ...) I didn't even notice it when I drizzled the dressing atop the greens, cucumber and tomatoes. Not until Matt came to the table and commented on the camouflage salad we were eating did I realize how odd the whole thing looked, and how much, indeed, it looked like camouflage. Stirring it in didn't help--just made the whole thing look really muddy. The great unwashed, Matt called it, a phrase he usually reserves for his sophomores. Oh well, food stylists have to know all sorts of tricks, and maybe someday knowing how to make a camouflage salad will come in handy (and now I even know how to spell it, too!)