Eating Art: Trenchers

Alright, I know that the walk down memory lane to my Eating Art event might be getting old, but I feel like if I don’t get all these recipes out, I won’t be able to move on, so don’t be upset with me.

Anyway, this one would make a nice Halloween treat. I have a lot of plates. The Cage Free Tomato is convinced that I have many a single plate for the blog photos, but untrue. The blog has actually been a nice way for me to prove to my husband that all those years of dimestore and second-hand store plates were really for a purpose. Thanks blog.

Even then, we still had to plan in dishwashing to have enough plates for our ten course meal. To add a little more insurance we made one course where the plate was edible—though the guests were uncertain whether they would need to keep it for more than one course.

The idea was not mine, but a regular feature of the Medieval dinner table. Day old bread would be a plate shared by every two dinners. That’s right, you didn’t get a plate and you had to share your not-plate. But, at least you were eating, right?

So for our trenchers, taking a cue from Wild Yeast, we used pizza dough doctored with olives, fennel and olive oil, and made simple rounds.

And here in lies my confession, we decorated one plate after it was baked with tomato paste (red) and spinach/green food coloring (green), but our diners received undecorated ones. Because, well, we were swamped with work.