Serve Your Dips In Cabbage Bowls To Wow Your Party Guests

Food presentation truly matters, and most chefs have their own go-to methods for doing it well. For instance, culinary icon Ina Garten favors a plating technique inspired by picture frames. If you want your dinner party or other occasion to be truly memorable, a visually pleasing culinary arrangement can feed your guests' senses long before they take a bite. One fun way to do this is with edible serving dishes, and cabbage bowls are particularly impressive and easy to execute.

Adding color and cleverness to your table or buffet, cabbage bowls are achieved by simply halving heads of the vegetable and then hollowing out the centers, leaving behind a concave, dish-like space that is a perfect vehicle for dips and sauces. Using both green and purple cabbage will lend color variety to the presentation.

To achieve this veggie dish, first segment the cabbage. Determine which end it will be most stable standing on and use that as the base (you can also cut the stem end of the vegetable to make a flat bottom, if needed). All heads are unique, so cut to achieve the serving height you would like. With a larger one this may mean chopping it in half, while a smaller head may merely require cutting a couple of inches from the top. Next, take a knife and cut around the interior circumference of the veggie, leaving an adequate border to form a sufficiently secure bowl. Once you've cut away some of the innards, you can finish scooping out the rest with a spoon until the cabbage bowl is deep enough to hold the intended contents.

There are many other ways to get crafty with edible dishes. Going this extra creative mile will reward you with smiling, complimentary companions who won't soon forget the experience. Continuing with the cabbage theme, an outer cabbage leaf all on its own naturally forms a perfect little dish-like shape to hold things like nuts or pretzels. The only prep required is removing the leaf from the head, washing it, and letting it dry sufficiently before filling it. Segmented, deveined bell peppers also make great snack and dip holders.

Melons make perfect bowl-like vessels to hold sweet snacks and fruit. Decorative edges, like scallops or zigzags, can be carved into the rim of a hollowed-out watermelon for added visual effect. A watermelon bowl can also be turned upside down and become a holder for fruit kebab skewers, which can be speared right into the rind, creating a visually stunning serving solution for a food creation that is normally tricky to serve. A watermelon husk can additionally serve as a container for beverages, and a pineapple corer is the gadget hack you need to easily make a watermelon keg.

If you want to take your edible containers all the way to guests' individual place settings, bread bowls are excellent for serving many foods beyond soup. You can also hollow out apples with a melon baller for excellent edible dessert dishes to hold treats like ice cream, custards, and puddings.