Any festive table, regardless of the scale of the event - be it a wedding, a half-century anniversary, International Women's Day or a modest romantic dinner in honor of the day you met - cannot be imagined without delicious and original salads.
It’s probably impossible to count how many recipes there are, because every housewife has her own original salad, which she came up with herself. But that’s not what we’ll talk about here. Any salad, whether it’s your signature or one that has been proven for centuries, needs to be decorated and served so that it becomes the center of everyone’s attention. Of course, to make the salad attractive, you will need skill and experience, craftsmanship and imagination, good taste and ingenuity.
But if there is no time left to fantasize, and you need a beautiful salad urgently, we suggest using our tips and some ideas that will help you make your dish colorful and creative, and perhaps lead you to create an even more stunning masterpiece.
So, this article will not contain any salad recipes. You can base it on your favorite one, the one you cook most often, the one your guests and family love. We will talk exclusively about decorating salads.
International Women's Day March 8
Salads for International Women's Day on March 8 can be made in the form of the number “8”. Any non-layered salad is prepared and mixed in a separate bowl. After that, two glasses or jars of different sizes are placed on a flat holiday dish, with a smaller diameter at the top and a larger diameter at the bottom, so that together they form something similar to the number “8.”
The salad is laid out around this structure and after that its top and sides are further decorated. Since this is a holiday of women and spring, decorating with canned corn in combination with sprigs of dill will look good, you will get something like a bouquet of mimosa. You can simply sprinkle chopped dill on top of the salad, place halves of cherry tomatoes on it like little ladybugs, and arrange calla lilies made from thin slices of cheese around it.
A salad in the form of a small basket with violets will look very cute.
It would be nice to serve it in portions to each guest. You will need to place a small portion of the salad on a flat dish, forming it in the shape of a barrel, cover the sides with salty cracker cookies, and on top make greens from lettuce leaves and pink violets from thinly chopped radishes; you can sprinkle a little grated egg yolk in the middle of the flower.
Original ideas for decorating holiday salads
Lately, chefs have never ceased to amaze gourmets. Just look at the cost of an appetizer or salad made... in a plate of fruit (pineapple, orange, watermelon, etc.). True, the tastes must be combined, otherwise, instead of exotic cuisine, guests will try something inedible.
This unusual idea of serving salad has long been used, such as placing it in a separate bowl, glass or tartlet. Some even serve snacks on chips! Or in pita bread. By the way, an interesting article on how to make shawarma at home.
How to decorate a salad for the New Year
You can see the ideas for decorating New Year's alats in the photo. The main principle that guided the chefs was maintaining the theme . Chimes, snowflakes, winter, Santa Claus - all this can become a beautiful picture in the right hands, but in others it will turn into an absurd and tasteless mass...
Mothers are often very puzzled - how to decorate a children's salad so that the child eats everything without a trace (it is no secret that many little gourmets have a poor appetite). Use cheerful and funny associations, usually these are animals - cats, pigs, butterflies, ladybugs, and your child will not be able to tear himself away from the plate. Even boiled quail eggs will be eaten.
Don't forget to serve the spices beautifully too! For example, homemade mustard, the recipe for which you will find on our website.
A final piece of advice: before preparing a new dish, carefully study and prepare a list of the products it consists of, and search the Internet for options for decorating it. You can even draw it on a separate piece of paper and practice in advance. Good luck to you in this interesting matter.
Fruit slices should also be beautiful! From the video you can learn how to serve beautiful fruits to the table:
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Holy Resurrection of Christ - Easter
For the bright and great holiday of Easter, we not only bake Easter cakes and paint eggs, but also prepare a lot of goodies, just like for the New Year's table. The holiday is truly great, and strict fasting is observed, you can allow yourself to break your fast and celebrate.
Salads for this day should be decorated in the same light and clean style and spirit. No bright flashy colors, there should be pure tenderness. Place any salad in a crystal salad bowl, grate hard cheese on top, cut petals from boiled egg whites and place flowers with them, place fresh parsley between them. As they say, simple, but tasteful.
An ordinary herring under a fur coat can be beautifully decorated with a basket made of thin, slightly melted strips of cheese. On top are flowers made from boiled carrots, shredded cabbage, and the whole thing is completed with fresh greens with thin strips of leeks wrapped in rings.
For strong families and all lovers
For Valentine's Day or for some special family date, you can prepare a layered salad and lay it out in the shape of a heart, and garnish with boiled shrimp and red caviar.
Now the holiday of Saints Peter and Fevronya, which is called the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity, is gaining particular popularity in Russia, it is celebrated on July 8th. On this holiday or on the anniversary of a marital relationship, it will be very symbolic to decorate the salad with a pair of swans made from boiled egg whites and many red hearts cut from sweet bell peppers.
7. Dressing salads using serving rings
Salads with mayonnaise or sour cream can be laid out in a neat and beautiful round shape, using a culinary ring that you can make yourself, cutting out of a plastic bottle. You can also use large removable baking pans. To do this, you need to place the ring on a plate, fill it tightly with salad and carefully remove the ring.
The salad will hold its shape perfectly, and to continue its design, you can lay out the various ingredients that make up it around it.
For our beloved kids
When we celebrate the birthdays of our beloved children and invite their friends to visit, it is very important to interest the children in original designs and decorations of the most ordinary salads.
You can put them on a dish in the form of some kind of animal and then, using multi-colored pieces of boiled or fresh vegetables, herbs, olives, cheese and sausage, canned corn and peas, attach paws, eyes, tails and ears to these animals.
Children will also be delighted with the fruit salad in the form of a Rubik's cube. All you need to do is carefully cut the existing fruits into equal cubes. You can also use marshmallows, Turkish delight, and marmalade in this salad. To prevent the cubes from falling apart, you need to coat each layer with yogurt, honey or gelatin, then let these salads stand in the refrigerator so that the entire Rubik's cube is well held together.
The main thing is to then bring it to the table and put it on the table for the little ones, and then let them do whatever they want - they eat, change cubes, choose their favorite fruits, or eat only oriental sweets. These are children, and they have a holiday, sometimes we have to allow ourselves to spoil them.
Salad “Sunflower”
This is a quite popular and original salad. It is very bright, which will undoubtedly decorate your holiday table.
Ingredients:
- 400 grams of turkey fillet;
- 2 pcs. small onions;
- 1 PC. large carrots;
- 4 (5) pcs. eggs;
- 1 can of canned corn;
- 200 grams of champignon mushrooms;
- olive oil;
- yellow chips;
- light mayonnaise;
- salt.
1. First, boil the ingredients we need - carrots and eggs. Once they are ready, cool them.
2.Meanwhile, peel the onions, rinse them and cut them into small cubes.
3.Cut the idea fillet into small cubes.
4.Now heat a small amount of olive oil in a frying pan and fry the turkey pieces until lightly browned. In time it will be about ten minutes. Once the meat is cooked, place it in a bowl to allow it to cool completely.
5.Now place the onion in the same frying pan. It also needs to be fried until golden brown. There is no need to salt the onion. After cooking, leave the onion in the pan to cool.
6.Now mushrooms. If you are using fresh mushrooms, fry them in a frying pan until fully cooked. Canned mushrooms just need to be taken out of the jar and cut into small pieces.
7.Now we begin to lay out our sunflower in layers. Take a flat dish and place the fried meat on it as the first layer. Lightly coat with mayonnaise.
8.Now rub the carrots directly over the meat. This will be the second layer. Covering the salad with carrots in this way will make it much airier. Also grease with a little mayonnaise.
9.The next layer will be mushrooms. Spread them with mayonnaise as desired (depending on whether you have fatty ones).
10. Fried onions will be the fourth layer in the salad. Lubricate it a little with mayonnaise.
11.Now comes a layer of eggs. If you want to decorate the final version of the sunflower with yolks, then you need to leave two, but if not, then rub all the eggs on top at this stage. Coat everything well with mayonnaise.
12.Now spread the corn on the mayonnaise in a thick layer. It is on this that you can rub two yolks if you wish, but you don’t have to do this, but leave the corn kernels on top.
13.Now remove what has fallen from the edge of the dish and put the salad in the refrigerator for about twenty minutes. Before serving, very carefully insert the chips around the edge of the salad. Sprinkle green onions on top and plant a ladybug. Salad ready. Bon appetit!
Birthday flower basket
For your mother or friend’s birthday, you can come with an original gift - a salad prepared with your own hands in the form of a basket of flowers. It’s clear that you can’t drag yourself across the whole city with such a gift, but in case you live in the neighborhood, you can be pleasantly surprised.
Prepare any tasty salad, decorate one half of which with short strips of cheese, laid out like a wicker basket, sprinkle the other half with finely chopped fresh herbs and place on it randomly different flowers from boiled eggs and vegetables, cheese and bright bell peppers. The handle of the basket can also be made from cheese, melting it a little and giving it the desired shape.
Basic principles for decorating salads
To decorate the salad, use the same products that make up the salad or that go well with it. For example: Olivier salad, which includes meat, or fish - Mimosa can be decorated with potatoes, boiled carrots or eggs, for example, in the form of lilacs: we place the salad itself on a dish, we make lilac inflorescences from egg whites colored with beet juice, grated on a coarse grater , white - from simply grated protein. Sprinkle with yolk and white in a circle and place sprigs of greenery between the inflorescences.
You can serve the salad in a beautiful vase, glass or wooden bowl with original carvings around the edge, or in an unusually shaped dish. A salad served in pumpkin, melon or pineapple, peeled from the pulp, will look unusual. This will definitely impress your guests and will be remembered for a long time. Here's a recipe for an easy-to-make pineapple coleslaw.
- red cabbage - 200 grams
- canned pineapples - 150 grams
- canned corn - 100 grams
- carrots - one piece
- cucumber - one piece
- lemon - one piece
- chopped walnuts - 50 grams
- mayonnaise - four tablespoons
Mix all ingredients, season with mayonnaise and place in previously peeled pineapple.
If several salads are served on the table at once, it is better to decorate them in different ways, but do not overdo it, excessive decoration can also worsen the appearance of the dish. The edge of the salad bowl should be free of food. Salads are decorated before serving, otherwise the decorations may lose their appearance and become ugly and unappetizing.
By mixing different products you can get different colors. Here are some examples:
- burgundy - boiled beets
- red - tomatoes, sweet peppers, cranberries, pomegranate seeds
- pink - cranberry or beet juice
- yellow - sweet pepper, egg yolk colored with saffron, rice, corn kernels
- orange – carrots, bell peppers, tomato paste, carrot juice
- blue - rice or grated egg white, colored with the juice of raw red cabbage
- green - bell peppers, dill, parsley, green peas, olives, mashed boiled spinach, cucumbers
- purple - red cabbage
- lilac - grated egg white, tinted with raw beet juice
- white - radish, radish, egg white, sour cream, potatoes, rice, whipped cream, cottage cheese
Decorative carving of fruits and vegetables - carving - has become popular in recent years. Decorations for salads can be made from different products, for example: cheese, if it is cut with a curly knife into pieces of different shapes - triangles, squares, diamonds, and so on. You can make curly cuts on the lemon peel, and then cut it into thin slices.
You can make bells from cucumbers, cut them into ribbons and make roses from them, and water lilies from cucumbers and eggs. Thick cucumbers can be turned into baskets and filled with sour berries or small radishes.
Tomatoes are useful for fly agarics and roses, and radishes for pine cones and tulips. Just keep them in cold water so that the bitterness comes out. A chrysanthemum made from radish will look simply amazing.
And the eggs! Whatever they make of them. Mushrooms, petals, flowers. They are rubbed, scored, sliced. Here's how to decorate your flower-shaped potato salad with them.
The younger generation will not be able to appreciate fine china, elegant tablecloths or intricate, elaborate treats. But the decorations and beautiful, original design of salads and other dishes for a children's party will be appreciated by children with a good appetite and exclamations: “Wow, yay!” Your task is not to prepare a myriad of treats, but to make them attractive and appetizing so that your child’s guests have fun.
We hope that our selection of ideas for beautiful decorations for children's dishes will help you arrange a fun baby shower for your child! So that your baby can appreciate all your efforts, be sure to involve him in decorating salads and decorating dishes with interesting design elements.
Usually for a children's party we prepare light salads, one or two hot dishes and, of course, cake and pastries. Don't forget about the fruit slices! Children need vitamins! Let's see what design we can handle!
Very often it is difficult to feed children at a holiday with anything other than sweet water and cake. The task of the adult part of the host party is to feed the children real food. We need to present healthy salads in such a way that fidgets are interested!
For salad design we use fresh and boiled vegetables and eggs, olives and lemon. All we need is a sharp knife, a grater and a little time. Moreover, your little and active assistant is already standing next to you!
This original salad design is made using canned olives, suluguni cheese or long strands of Korean carrots. At the same time, you can teach children about spiders, right?
Entrust these ladybugs to your assistant - they are so easy to make! We cut out the heads of the insect from olives, the antennae from stalks of greenery, the dots on the red shell from green parsley leaves, and the “bugs” perched on the parsley! Beautiful, is not it?
This vegetable “cake” is wonderful! As you can see, a very simple option! Carrots, cucumbers and cranberries! If there are no cranberries, both viburnum and rowan will do. Even the corn looks decent!
Place the vegetable flower on a separate plate, and secure the entire structure with a pair of toothpicks. While you are preparing the salad, the flower vegetable plates will “remember” their shape. After placing the flower in, carefully remove the toothpicks, because restless guests will immediately want to taste the “petals”!
Shredded carrots and cheese on a cheese grater are our tried and tested tools for decorating salads. Look at these attractive dishes! Tiger cub, mushroom, mouse... It’s very easy to decorate a dish using these products!
Fungus
The mushroom is decorated not with hard cheese, but with grated egg whites and boiled carrots. The function of grass is perfectly performed by chopped dill or parsley, and the soil on the stem is a row of olives. You can “plant” a couple of ladybugs on a mushroom, which can be easily made from a small tomato and an olive.
It is often very difficult to feed children healthy food, so consider the idea of a beautiful mushroom-shaped dish to serve vegetables to your child every day.
Rabbit
A salad mixture laid out in the shape of a rabbit usually delights not only children, but also adult guests. To keep a salad dressed with mayonnaise in shape, try to slightly reduce the amount of dressing (mayonnaise). Thin cheese shavings also help hold the lettuce structure together. The ears are the inner leaves of Chinese cabbage.
Worker "Bee"
Your little helper can lay out such a bee! Just cut the olives first for this mosaic! Alternate olives on a salad with brightly colored corn kernels. Thick sheets of white cabbage will serve as the “wings” of the bee - you just need to cut out the necessary elements from them with culinary scissors.
Smile of the sun
This smiling sun will cheer you up even on a cloudy day, and decorating such a salad is as easy as shelling pears! You can decorate the salad in portions in the same way! Well, how can a child not try the bright smiling sun!
wise snake
But you will have to tinker with the snake! The tricky part is keeping the serving platter looking clean and fresh. And since this is quite difficult to achieve, let's arrange it in the grass, which will cover the surface of the serving dish. Any greenery can serve as grass. As you can see in our pictures, the appearance of the “snake” salad can vary.
You can convey all the beauty of snakeskin scales using products of different colors. It all depends on the availability of suitable products and your imagination. Cheese slicers (with a wavy knife) and apple corers can help.
Ships
But this decoration of salad compositions is a little different from the previous ones! The salad is laid out in portions into cucumber halves. You can play with this with sweet peppers too.
Fabulous and magical New Year and Christmas
Salads decorated in the form of Christmas wreaths will look very beautiful and symbolic at a New Year's festive feast.
Any salad must be prepared in a separate bowl and all ingredients mixed. After this, place a mold or jar on a festive flat dish, around which the wreath will be placed. Next, you need to lay out the salad in a circle, generously sprinkle it on all sides with dill (after all, it is very similar to fluffy spruce branches), randomly scatter pomegranate seeds and canned corn, like New Year’s toys.
Now roll up candles from the melted cheese plates, make a tongue of flame from pieces of red or yellow bell pepper, and place the candles throughout the wreath. Such a salad should rightfully take center stage on the table on a fabulous and magical New Year's Eve.
We propose to arrange herring under a fur coat, without which the New Year is not complete in any normal Russian family, in an original way in the form of a roll, decorate with fresh parsley and flowers made from boiled egg whites.
We hope that our tips and examples of decorating salads for various events will be useful to you, and based on them you will invent your own dish decorations.
How to decorate a holiday table. Beautiful snacks for the holiday table, recipe with photos
Menu:
- A mimosa branch is a decoration for salads on March 8th.
- How carrot flower step by step .
- Elegant appetizer “Tulips”, recipe for stuffed tomatoes with photo.
- A very simple salad - in 20 minutes.
- Video - ideas for decorating salads for March 8th.
Mimosa branch—a festive decoration for salads on March 8
We need only two components: a chicken egg yolk and a sprig of dill.
- Grate the yolk on a fine grater. The yolk must be cold, otherwise the mass must be
will be compressed.
Pay attention to the color of the yolk - it should be yellow, like the flowers on a mimosa branch.
2. Now let's prepare a branch of dill. We put it on the salad to be decorated (I have it on a plate). If necessary, cut and join to give more fluffiness.
3. We take the yolk mass into a teaspoon and carefully shake it onto the surface of our dill branch. We don’t press it, on the contrary, it should be loose and airy. This is the only way to get a real semblance of a mimosa branch.
4. Sprinkle the branch generously so that there are as few gaps as possible. When a mimosa blooms, the branch is literally showered with yellow flowers and it looks very, very beautiful.
5. Our mimosa branch is ready. She looks very festive and elegant. And of course it will decorate your salad and give it an additional spring mood.
How to make a carrot flower step by step
We will need 1 raw carrot, a toothpick and parsley for decoration.
- We cut raw carrots into thin circles in any convenient way.
2. Place all the cuts in a deep plate with cold, slightly salted water. Let stand for 15 - 20 minutes. The cut circles will become more elastic and will curl easily.
3. Place carrots on a napkin.
4. And remove excess moisture with the same napkin.
5. Lay out the circles in stripes, on top of each other and roll them into a tube.
6. Pinch it with a toothpick on both sides.
7. The result is such a pretty rose, worthy of taking the best place on the holiday table.
Elegant snack “Tulips”. Tomatoes stuffed with cottage cheese and garlic, step by step with photos
Ingredients:
- Cream tomatoes (oblong), red and yellow – 6 pcs.
- Small, yellow “Cream” tomatoes – 10 pcs.
- Pepper (large) – 1 pc.
- Greens - celery, parsley, basil - 1 bunch
- Cottage cheese – 150 gr.
- Sour cream - 1 tbsp. spoon
- Garlic – 1 clove
- Salt to taste.
Now, using the simplest ingredients, we will prepare a festive, savory cottage cheese snack. Stuff it with tomatoes and decorate with herbs.
Preparing the filling
- Place cottage cheese in a deep salad plate. Squeeze a clove of garlic and add some salt.
2. Combine with sour cream and mix thoroughly until smooth, not liquid. Our filling is ready.
3. Let's begin the mystery of turning an ordinary tomato into a scarlet flower. To do this, use a sharp knife to make several deep cuts, outlining the future petals of the flower.
4. Very carefully, using a teaspoon, peel the pulp from the tomato.
5. Stuff our tomatoes with spicy curd filling.
6. We make the core of our exotic flower from a small whole tomato placed on a curd filling. And we will prepare a vase from yellow bell pepper, cut in half.
7. Let’s add a flight of fancy to the greens and stuffed flowers. The spring bouquet deserves the best place on the holiday table.
Tomato appetizer “Tulips”
A simple salad - in 20 minutes
The salad deserves special attention. This delicacy gets 3 A's because it's: BEAUTIFUL, SIMPLE AND QUICK TO COOK
