Imagine that the dinner plate is like a beautiful work of art, propped in the entryway of your house and guests will see the artwork as the first impression of your home. Consider thinking about your next meal this way. Your husband, wife or child will walk to the dinner table and might just say, "Wow, Mom, this plate full of broccoli, salmon and risotto is just beautiful!" What a great way to start the meal and encourage healthy eating and satisfied, nourished tummies for your family! Most people, unless you are a gourmet chef at a fancy restaurant, do not think of food as art. But if you have some spare time over the next couple of weeks, have fun and get creative with your next dinner presentation. For kids especially, the visual perception can go a long way. (Have you ever been served overcooked, limp and colorless broccoli as a kid? Uggh, who wants to eat that?!) Here are a few basic suggestions to help you bring creative art to your dinner table:

1. Most restaurants serve their meals on a white dinner plate for a good reason. The white plate is a blank slate, allowing for the most creativity to come from the food itself. If a restaurant was to use red plates to serve Copper River salmon with beets, the vibrant colors of the beautiful food would be masked by the color in the plates. If you don’t have white plates at home, just be mindful of your food color choices when trying to impress guests (or kids) with your new food art.


2. Start the planning with your entree that will assume the largest part of the plate, and then work around it. Try to find a complimentary vegetable or starch to go with your steak -- a good choice might be bright green asparagus or sweet potatoes, but the color of cooked eggplant would be too bland with the steak).


3. Choose an odd number of food items for your plate. Three choices is usually adequate, but five foods can be appropriate for large celebratory dinners. Visually, an odd number of items is more pleasing to the eye.


4. Consider the shape of foods. If you have a square piece of fish or tofu, consider serving a bright red tomato cut into circles with mozzarella balls. The square and circles will naturally complement each other on the plate.


5. Just as you would do when planting a garden, remember the balance of height on the plate. If your chicken marsala topped with mushrooms is a naturally flatter piece, consider adding height to the plate with big, chunky vegetables, whipped potatoes or a full salad.


6. Don’t overfill the plate. Personally, I find it a bit nauseating to be served a plate which has been stuffed with different foods, overflowing sauces and runny juices. It’s almost as if I can feel the stomachache coming at any moment during the meal.


7. And lastly, trust your instinct. I took a brief creative photography class years ago, and one piece of my instructor’s advice has always stuck with me. When I asked her how to choose balanced photos for my collages, she told me to trust my eyes -- in other words, if the layout of the photos doesn’t immediately look right to you, it probably isn’t balanced. I think that is a great rule of thumb to use with any artistic project. You might not have that much time or flexibility with your dinner meals, but use your imaginations and loosely try to picture the food on the plate before preparing it. And when you dine out, you can observe the chefs’ presentations of the meals and consider how you might improve it at home!