Making dishes for the festive table with your own hands

When decorating the table for the upcoming holiday, in order to create the appropriate atmosphere, it is important to pay special attention to the decoration of the dishes. Knowing some of the intricacies of decorating food, you can make a real masterpiece of culinary art from simple products. Not everyone knows how to decorate dishes for the festive table with their own hands.

A beautifully decorated table can highlight the festive atmosphere. You can delight your guests with dishes that have not only amazing taste, but also beautiful appearance.

In cooking, there is a separate area of ​​artistic cutting of fruits and vegetables - carving. Whole bouquets can be formed from products cut according to a certain technology to decorate the table. Cutting complex elements will require sharp knives with different blade sizes.

In addition to the food and kitchen tools themselves, for a beautiful decoration of the festive table, the following devices will be required:

• serving skewers;
• toothpicks;
• napkins.

The process is quite painstaking, it takes a lot of time, so please be patient and calculate in advance when and what dish to start at one time or another.

One of the most popular ways to decorate dishes is to decorate with flowers made from pieces of vegetables. Use a narrow-bladed knife to cut vegetables into thin slices.The core of the flower is formed from a plate twisted into a tube of small diameter. From the remaining thinly chopped vegetables, you need to make petals.

The finished flower is fixed at the base with a toothpick. The following vegetables are most often used to create such a decoration:

• tomatoes;
• cucumbers;
• beet;
• radish or radish;
• carrot.

Using simple products, you can create original decorations for festive dishes. Green or black olives, green onions and bell peppers make beautiful palms. To form the trunk of a palm tree, you need to put on a skewer for serving olives. The leaves of the tree can be made from chives or jagged bell pepper chunks.

Vegetables and fruits can be used to create stunning animal or cartoon characters. If you pin green grapes to the base of the pear with toothpicks, and put black grapes on the narrow edge, you get a small hedgehog. Hedgehog eyes can be formed from small pieces of black grapes. You can make a poodle from cauliflower.

To decorate sweet dishes, you can make small pictures of fruits and berries. It is enough to cut the fruit into slices of the desired shape and form this or that image from the resulting pieces. Strawberries, like vegetables, can be used to make beautiful flowers.

The watermelon can be used as a basket for fruit salad or other sweet dishes. First you need to outline the handle of the basket on the peel of the berry. After that, unnecessary parts are cut out of the watermelon and the pulp is removed.

On the festive table there are always meat, fish, cheese, fruit and vegetable cuts. Even such simple products can be beautifully served to guests. Slices from different types of vegetables look bright in themselves. Flowers can be made from vegetables or simply supplemented with herbs.

All food should be cut into thin slices to create a beautiful cuts of meat. Almost transparent slices of sausage and boiled pork will be nicely arranged on a plate in the form of tubes, flowers or in other ways.

The cheese slices should be served on a large, flat plate. It is recommended to combine different types of cheese, cut into slices of different shapes. It is customary to put a small saucepan or bowl of honey in the center of the dish. An exquisite combination will look spectacular.

The fish cuts can include one or more types of fish. It can be cut in a variety of ways, depending on the variety and quantity. The combination of lightly salted salmon and smoked halibut will look beautiful.

Many salads look pretty attractive and don't need any extra decoration. However, you can always resort to some tricks of the original design and change the usual dish beyond recognition. For example, the familiar herring salad under a fur coat can be laid out in the shape of a fish or decorated with carrot roses.

It should be remembered that for decorating salads it is better to use those products that are part of the dish or go well with all the ingredients. There are several basic principles for the beautiful design of salads:

• Puff salads can be given a variety of shapes: geometric shapes, animals, plants. For convenience, you can use special dishes or other convenient devices (for example, curly plastic cake boxes).
• With the help of certain products, you can add an interesting flavor to the dish.For example, you can get a blue tint if you add red cabbage juice to boiled rice.
• Figures or flowers made of vegetables or fruits will be an excellent decoration for a festive dish.
• When decorating salads, do not forget about the dishes in which the dish will be served. A brightly decorated salad will look better in plain or transparent, discreet dishes.

A baked bird is almost always present on the New Year's and Christmas festive table. It can be chicken, duck, goose or turkey. The baked game itself looks quite appetizing and attractive, but quite ordinary.

For a beautiful presentation of second courses on the festive table, you can use the following ideas:

• Whole baked chicken can be served on a plate garnished with lettuce and cherry tomatoes. A bird in pineapple pieces or canned fruits will look more exotic.
• Duck is traditionally baked with apples. In this case, apples can be used not only for stuffing poultry, but also as a decoration for a dish. You can bake several fruits whole to garnish a festive meal.

• A plate with a baked goose can be garnished with herbs (salad, parsley) and lemon wedges. A bird decorated with berries or fruits will look original: grapes, cranberries, apples, kiwi, oranges or strawberries.
• Culinary compositions of baked turkey with berries and fruits of various shades look very beautiful.

In addition to the beautiful presentation of dishes, you need to be able to properly set the table. You need to lay out the cutlery symmetrically. Place the dishes in a straight line or in a circle if the table is round. Napkins can be not only a practical item, but also a decorative element if folded beautifully.

Table setting can be done in a specific style: focus on the season or the theme of the holiday. It is worth adhering to a harmonious combination of shades and shapes.

For information on how to beautifully decorate a festive table, see the next video.