As it's Monday and without fail I always miss the lovely #fruitsandveggiesmonday contest created by the inspiring @lenasveganliving but today somehow I've managed to remember and don't want to miss the first time to have ago and enter.

You won't believe this but at the age of 25 I still didn't know what a leek was, until I went food shopping with my best friend and we brought one because we thought it was giant spring onion. How we laughed about it when we got home when our room mate informed us otherwise, I guess we weren't too far off. Now I have discovered the wonderful world of the leek the only dishes that I ever used it in is soup. I wanted to do something a bit more exciting as I was getting inspired by all the new visual experiences around me, in Berlin. I wanted to share this visual process with you all...

My Inspirations around the City

The building I was staying in had these lovely orange tones on the staircase. It made me think of sweet potatoes and I thought it would be a nice combination with the leek, taste wise. I kept seeing tower blocks with lots of layers of colors, which kept reinforcing the idea to create some kind of colorful tower display.

The place I was staying had lots of colorful dishes which reminded me of this graffiti and that it would be nice to use the color of the green leak against pink or orange tones. The yoga statue (only 2minutes walk from the apartment) gave me the idea to layer round slices of sweet Potato on top of one another.

Getting to work back at the apartment

I still wasn't hundred percent sure exactly what I was going to produce. I knew I wanted to make a sauce with the Leek and use sweet potato the rest was still a mystery. So I started experimenting with some of the ingredients I brought on my bio shop you can view my post about my bio shopping in Berlin here.

As the sweet potato was quite expensive just for one, I chopped off the smaller pointed ends of the sweet potato and used them to create a mash with some regular potatoes. I cut the middle part of the sweet potato in to round slices and basted with olive oil and baked in the oven. Then I started frying the leek first, then removed to side, moved on to the mushrooms and fried them with a little left over bean broth, then moved to side dish and finally fried kale and added them to the mashed potatoes. I used half the fried leek in the sauce I wanted to try making, its my own blend using soaked walnuts and mushrooms with the mushroom juice, some dried herbs and Himalaya salt. Even by this point I still wasn't exactly sure about the final design of the food. My original thoughts were to have three dishes displayed like a tower on different levels using the colorful display boxes. (see post it note picture above left)

I wasn't that happy with the outcome visually and I wanted to use the sweet potato slices some how on top of the colorful pots but realized it wasn't exactly working out because the layers would be hidden inside the pot. So I scrapped the idea of the pots and decided to layer it out on a white plate. I thought it would be fun to do some plate art, although I don't think it came out looking as pro as I wanted, it was still nice to create the elegance of restaurant style cuisine. The hardest part was not being able to eat it, whilst I experimented with the layers, it took a few tries!

It was the first time i'd ever seen a red carrot in real life, I had to buy them as I thought it would be great for my colorful theme. I tried to grow rainbow carrots once myself but failed, so I was so happy to finally be able to try them. They look so beautiful, especially raw that I had to display them with the leek dip separately, I also used the ends of the leek stalks and put some of the dip inside them just for visual aesthetic purposes.

The Final Creations

I had taken over 50 pictures to try and get the right angles, I was hoping to finish whilst it was still light to get natural sun light in the photos which always look so much more natural and nicer but as you can see it was dark. I was quite tired and decided not to eat my new lovely creation as I wouldn't be able to enjoy it. I saved it for the next day, managed to get a few shots in the mid morning light. Finally I re-heated it up in the oven and had a nice tasty lunch.

Sometimes I don't like the taste of leek, if I'm going to be perfectly honest I actually had a phobia of onions for most of my life until I made to conscious effort to over come my eating fears. I hated the texture of crunchy and smiley onions, particularly raw and under cooked, it turned into a phobia, it took many years to work that out of my thought process but even to this day, I'm still a bit funny if there are too many onions in my dish, I leave them to one side. There are many health properties associated with onion and I appreciate they add a nice flavor to dishes. The leek and sweet potato were an especially good comb because the sweetness of the potato works so well against the pungent onion flavor. These two vegetables are seriously healthy too especially sweet potato for the lungs.