Coming soon!

MILK teaser from Milk Products on Vimeo.

Been working with the fun folks at Milk Products Media on a top-secret project. I've never done food art at quite this scale or pace before and it blew my mind a bit, but what a great experience.

More soon!

Of interest to cooks: Free Gourmet Salt Samples

http://hip2save.com/2010/01/free-gourmet-salt-sample-free-shipping.html

Lest anyone get the wrong idea...

I do food art to entertain myself. When I take a picture and put it up there on flickr, it's "hey, look at this silly thing I made out of food." That's it. I'm not trying to persuade anyone that what I've made is scrumptious, or precisely balanced nutritionally, or that it's what they should be feeding their kids. It's just a picture made out of food. I do my own thing, I make pictures out of food, that's where it begins and that's where it ends.

Now, there does exist a (large) bento community with whom I'm more-or-less loosely affiliated, in that a lot of my stuff shows up in bento boxes...I make oekakiben (picture bento). I'm not a mainstream bento-maker, though. If you're looking for nutritious ideas for an adorable lunch to send off with your preschooler, there are lots and lots of people who will have great information for you. You can browse flickr and see all kinds of appetizing combinations and great ideas for bento lunches. Do what you like. Bento is what you make it.

I eat what I make because I don't waste food. Blue rice, for all the reaction it seems to inspire in people, tastes like regular rice. It's just blue. It's tinted with natural food coloring, it's not harmful, it's just blue. The same goes for applesauce tinted blue and anything else I might have gone nuts and tinted blue at some point. Some people are fascinated with blue food. Some people find it repulsive. If you don't like it, you don't have to make it or eat it.

It's your choice. Everything is your choice...what ingredients to use, what recipes to make, what the nutritional balance should be, whether or not your rice is an orthodox color. You choose whether your sandwich looks like Hello Kitty or a monster or a good old no-frills sandwich.

Besides the me-vs-most-bento-makers comparison being a total apples-and-oranges thing, what's wrong with a little adventure? In my flickr profile (where I try to catch people on their way to announce to me what they think of blue rice), I mentioned chef Cat Cora and how fun her innovations can be. Cotton candy on soup gave her audience pause, but they swirled it in and found it delicious. This stuff can work.

Have you ever flipped through a magazine and seen one of those beef council ads, with the landscapes made of beef? There's brown sugar sand and sour cream snowcaps. Would you eat beef with brown sugar and sour cream? Probably not, but hey, it's a cool picture made of food. If it gives you a "hey, what if I..." moment, so much the better. And that's really all I'm doing.

Hope that helps clarify some things.

Be sure to check out this month's issue of Mothering...

It's this one, with the adorable baby girl on the cover. It's available at Barnes & Noble, Borders, Whole Foods and Babies R Us, among other places.

There's an excellent and surprisingly lengthy bento article inside, with how-tos. And I'm not just saying that because I contributed stuff...it's a really nice article. Well worth picking up. :)

The gallery opening was wonderful...

I really enjoyed meeting everyone and the three-hour reception just flew by. I was amazed by how many people came in off the street to have a look.

It was a great chance to help broadcast the merits of bento, and wonderful to see lightbulbs going off in people's heads as they got inspired to do their own thing. People were also very interested in information about natural food colorings and a lot of people took literature on the colorings with them. The sake and plum wine at the wine bar were also greatly enjoyed ;)

Having a gallery show was a wonderful experience and I'm really grateful to have that opportunity. The opening reception was a lot of fun.

My bento images (not the fresh ones, but the photos) will be hanging in the Art Space of Yellow Springs, 108 Dayton Street, until mid-August. The gallery was open to the public on that first evening, but by appointment the rest of the time. If you'd like to see what's there, email me or the Arts Council...I can open up the gallery if there's a free spot on their schedule.

Here are some photos from the opening reception. Thanks again, everyone :)

Couple bits of news...

Number one, 501 Bento Box Lunches is just now coming out in the states. (If you have it pre-ordered under "500 Bento Box Lunches", don't sweat it...it's the same book. They just gave you a bonus.) It's a collaborative effort and showcases a lot of talented people. The photos are beautiful and...perhaps on purpose...the paperback is just about the same size as the squarish one-tier boxes, which I found cute.

I saw some complaints on various reviews about lack of recipes and such, and I know that I did submit recipes, so they must have had to edit a lot for space. I'll go ahead and re-post some of those recipes here as soon as I get them tracked down again, so that they'll be available to the curious. Sorry about that...the editors make all the final decisions with that stuff.

Also, I have a gallery show coming up next month. I'm still not clear on exactly how long it will be...I think I have the gallery for a month, but the opening is on July 17th in the Art Space in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Still got to nail a lot of those details down. Because I obviously can't leave a bunch of bento boxes out in a gallery for a month, there will only be "fresh examples" on opening night...the rest will be assorted photos that might be familiar from those who know my stuff on flickr. I'd like to do some new ones too....we'll see how that goes. I had no idea that prepping for a gallery show was so much work.

As far as I know, I still have some stuff up in the hallway of Giacomo's, too.

Thanks :)

Korero's 501 Bentos Site

Natural Food Colorings- Pros and Cons

Because I use fairly vivid color in so much of my stuff, I'm a pretty big target out there for people who like to lecture me on the dangers of all the artificial colorings they're sure I'm using. The big problem with this is that, being a lifelong cancer patient and extremely conscious of what nasty chemicals might be entering my body, I actually use natural colors whenever I can. If you think some of my combinations are weird on the surface, try beet-flavored rice with a trailing vine of wasabi on top.

My coloring of choice is India Tree, but around here it's difficult to come by. Stores that carry India Tree dragées, decorating sugars and candied flowers have a mysterious and conspicuous absence of their food coloring. I almost always have to order it. Sometimes boxes pop up on ebay, or you can get them at sites like this.

The ingredients (going straight off the box, here):

Blue: Deionized water, glycerin, red cabbage.
Red: Beet juice, citric acid.
Yellow: Deionized water, glycerin, curcumin.

All natural stuff, a little dab goes far, and like any basic set of food colorings you can mix just about any color you want by tinkering with combinations.

The big drawback to natural food colorings (and this includes vegetable juices in general), is that you never quite get the flavor of the original plant out of the end product. Depending on how much you use, your rice can taste vaguely of cabbage or beets. The eggwhite pieces you painstakingly dyed orange may retain a slight, barely perceptible touch of turmeric. And this is just fine with savory ingredients (especially if you love Desi food), but it can get a tad weird when you're working with sweet stuff.

Also, there aren't many "black" natural food colorings, apart from squid or cuttlefish ink, and if you're allergic to shellfish like I am, that can pose a bit of a problem.

So as much as I love to use natural colorings, and as much as the health benefits are worth the extra expense, when I'm cooking for others I can never be quite sure how they'd feel about turmeric-flavored frosting on a cake. So no, I don't use them exclusively.

A totally organic, totally natural food base is definitely the ideal, and I make those choices whenever I can, but it doesn't work out for me 100% of the time. Sometimes I will use a drop of the cheap artificial stuff from the grocery store baking aisle. Not a lot, and not often, but it happens sometimes. I look around me and see brightly colored candies, drinks, and lots of seemingly "healthy" items, and read the labels only to find they're loaded with artificial colorings. I think we're taking in more of the stuff than we know, so I'm going to count being Generally Conscious of it as being a step in the right direction.

If you look at some very popular Japanese bento foods, you'll see that most patterned kamaboko, also mamenori, are made with either vaguely "natural" or outright artificial colorings. (Carmine powder, for the record, is made from the shell of a particular type of beetle). Some companies are better about using natural colorings than others. Many Indian foods, particularly sweets, also use colorings extensively.

If you don't mind the higher price, I definitely recommend ordering some India Tree coloring and giving it a try. Taste for yourself and decide if it's something you'd like to incorporate. I'm trying to adopt an approach of moderation- use natural when I can, artificial in small doses. It's just a matter of reading labels, staying informed and making the choices that fit your lifestyle.