The Art of Sensory Cooking (and Sensible Scrapping)
Essinova Artful Life Saturday Playshops Summer 2020 Dispatch 5 (Session 6 in review)
By Meena Selvanathan
“The Art of Sensory Cooking” playshop led us to the kitchen this weekend and on a delightful culinary journey spanning all our senses. As BeiBei Song mentioned, there is nothing more practical or primal than food. While conventional wisdom has it that one must feed the stomach before the soul, our facilitators Shalini Singh and Hojat Mohseni guided us to nourish both, and blurred the lines between the utility and art of food.
Shalini, a culinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY challenged us to use our senses rather than following a recipe word-for-word to assemble a beautiful salad. This type of sensory cooking allows for creativity, thinking outside of the box, and can also be very therapeutic. We started by mixing together salad dressings, channeling our inner chef to taste and balance the flavors to our own liking. We challenged ourselves to throw in something different to create a unique twist — our group added everything from chaat masala to seaweed!
Moving on to the leafy green base, we talked about ways to creatively chop and plate up various fruits and vegetables on top. We embraced the crunchy texture of radishes and the dual color of their slices, white discs with a bright pink peel. While we each prepared our ingredients, we collectively marveled at dragon fruit cubes speckled with black seeds, the sizzling grill marks on a juicy peach, a creatively star cut kiwi and more. Shalini encouraged us to embrace our inner chefs to experiment with different spices, textures, flavors and temperatures, and get our hands dirty.
One member sauteed pears in butter and sumac, another sprinkled in crunchy chia seeds and yet another garnished with vibrant borage flowers straight from their garden. In a short amount of time, all of us crafted complex layers of flavors, colors and textures using different ingredients and new combinations into unique salads, both eye-catching to look at and mouthwatering to eat. During the process, we set aside any peels and scraps for the second half of the workshop, led by Hojat Mohseni.
An arts and environmental enthusiast and green living community builder based in Shiraz, Iran, Hojat believes everyone is an artist, whether they know it or not. In this spirit, he challenged us to embrace our inner artist and think creatively about the peels and scraps we had generated so far.
Drawing inspiration from organic graphics, trash art, and the upcycling aesthetic, Hojat guided us through a series of exercises to draw faces, write words, and create free-form artworks with food. We got to work reimagining leftover scraps into eyes and noses, a heart made of carrot peels, our very own summer lemon man and more fun creations.
By the end of the playshop, we were all left with a delicious, inviting salad to dig into and fun pieces of art to take in. We had engaged all our senses in the kitchen, embracing and connecting with food and art on a different level. Thanks to Shalini and Hojat for a wonderful multi-sensory experience in the kitchen this weekend!
Coming up next: Sessions #7, the hero’s journey. Join us!
