Pretty Plating: Spruce Up Your Food Serving Skills

Hi, I'm Evette Rios here on eHow Food, and I wanted to share with you guys three different ways that I like to jazz up my ordinary holiday food so that it looks like a million bucks. Mashed potatoes, we always have them. I personally love them, it's one of my favorite food groups ever but usually we serve them in white bowls and it kind of goes away, you don't really notice how delicious the mashed potatoes are. So one of the things that I like to do is to use squash as bowls. So I've got the butternut squash and I've got it already hollowed out. So you're just going to take your mashed potatoes and just sort of spoon them in there and you know you can do this even if you, even if you didn't have mashed potatoes, you for instance had like mashed sweet potatoes or mashed squash you can do this with any sort of mash. The idea is just to kind of make the presentation a little bit more exciting and then I'm going to zuzh up the plate a little bit with, I've got these leaves, Fall leaves that I'm going to put on there and maybe a little sprig of rosemary and then I'm going to put a little bit of rosemary on the top of my potatoes and then I'll put the lid off to the side like so and I'll put the spoon right in there. It looks great and it's super easy. Okay so now for any sort of quiche or pie that you have, you know, the first thing is you know, a lot of times people bring things if you're doing let's say a potluck holiday dinner, they'll bring the quiche and they'll bring it to you on a plate or in a piece of Tupperware, throw it on something that's very neutral like this plate here and then I've got some rosemary also that I'm just going to kind of put around the outside. I'm just going to kind of jazz it up a little bit, just super easy and then the other thing that I like to do with any sort of pie or quiche like this is I actually like to cut into it first because I notice that people are a little hesitant to cut the first piece of pie or quiche out of the quiche so I just like to go ahead and cut it and you know, the rule for me is eight so just cut it into four and then cut your fours into halves and then you're good. It looks pretty and now people can just grab and go. So now finally for desert in my family the cheesecake is supreme. My mom makes a cheesecake every holiday and if she doesn't bring it, people get really mad. So you know, it's nice to dress it up a little bit. Sometimes also when you make a cheesecake it can crack at the top and you want to kind of hide that. It's perfectly tasty but it may not look so great so one of the things that I like to do is just get some fresh berries, mixed berries and just kind of sprinkle them on top and keep them controlled to the top of the cheesecake obviously, looks good and then because everybody loves sugar, just get some powdered sugar and a little spoon and just make it snow, oh yeah. See, now this dessert went from homemade to a million bucks. And there you go, I'm telling you, you will be impressing your guests this holiday season. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Evette Rios here on eHow.com. Happy holidays.