All Right Mr. DeMille, I'm Ready For My Instagram...

Culinary schools (and every Food Network reality show) make a big to-do about how food is “plated”---the restaurant term for how food looks on a plate. 

I’ve seen chefs lose their minds over baby carrots that were sliced just a half-a-fingernail-size too thick.

I’ve also seen customers ooh-and-aah over a plate that looked (as Andy Warhol used to say of Edie Sedgwick) “Beeee-u-ti-ful!”

Okay.  I mean---I “get it”. 

I get that it helps if food looks appetizing and appealing.  Americans aren’t the most adventurous of eaters so you’ve got to give them something shiny. 

But I’ve never been dazzled by three slivers of paper-thin parsnips and some foam. 

Frankly, the whole foam trend makes me a little ill.  I don’t care what the flavor is, it just looks like a dog spit up on my plate.

But I’ve seen foodies and Yelpers go bananas over this stuff.

Cell phones pop out for some tableside glamour shots and are immediately tweeted out to their followers---the majority of whom are too busy with their own fabulous lives to care about an Instagram photo of a filet of John Dory and some purée.   

But just then, chefs poke their over-worked and brain-addled heads thru the kitchen door with the kind of twitch that can only come from stress and too much cheap kitchen wine.  They suddenly turn into Eric Roberts in Star 80 watching their whore being photographed poorly in the nude by Hugh Hefner and go into an epileptic fit because the food runner accidentally presented the plate with the protein at 3 o’clock instead of the classical 6 o’clock position.

“Goddamnit!  What fucking idiot puts the chicken on the right?  What the fuck?  I can’t work with this shit!!!!!!”

And then he storms out and uses it as an excuse to go outside for a smoke break.

But yesterday I had one of THE most delicious things I’ve ever eaten that looked like crap on a plate.  Our Dominican dishwasher explained that it’s called “Pasteles en hoja” and is a traditional Dominican holiday dish.

Plantains and ground meat and spices wrapped in banana leaves?  I grabbed a tasting spoon and dove right in!

The amount of love that goes into a dish like this is astounding.  Something only a retired grandmother could make.

It contains some hard-to-find ingredients like plantains, malangas, auyama, banana leaves, and West Indian spices. 

Luckily I live in a Dominican neighborhood where I can find ALL these ingredients.  I WILL make this!  Because it totally rocks.

And luckily I have a little something called faith.

Because for once, I’m not going to blame my lousy cell phone camera----this dish looked pretty nasty. 

But I ate it.

And my faith was rewarded.

However, PLEASE don’t tell your chef friends about this dish.  They’ll only spend hours trying to figure out a way to fuck it all up.