Score:
Take a dish with all its ingredients and preparations
Find another dish
Experiment in a way to bring the two together in an artful way
Artist’s statement:
I love cooking and I also love experimenting with cooking, testing out different spices with different bases resulting in mixed reactions, sometimes good and sometimes not so good, but every time I experiment with cooking, I end up learning far more than when I just follow a recipe. Each ingredient adds something to a dish, for example, certain spices mixed will give a “tex mex” feel to a dish like cumin, paprika and cayenne mixed with lime, or an Italian feel from Oregano parsley and lemon. Dishes have a unique and deep taste to them, so what if we experimented a little further and combined two of them together. There are many ways to achieve this and none of them wrong, but some would probably taste better than others. I went with trying to combine Carbonara and Ramen, I also made sure to not break even a little bit of pasta in this process since I had already offended Italy by suggesting this. I initially wanted to try and add some bacon bits and a little bit of egg to instant ramen to replace the broth it is normally cooked in. At the end this tasted a bit off and a little greasy, like a hint of bacon in starchy noodles, then a friend informed me that Binging with Babish had made an episode on “Ramen improvements” where he had a “Ramenara” recipe. I of course tried it, and he added on top of the bacon bits some parmesan and some pasta water as well as he cooked the ramen in pork flavored broth. This version tastes much better and combines two storied dishes together in an artful way. I did not expect to eat all of this dish, but I did.
Using and combining two objects to create art is a staple in dada appropriation art, seen in Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel 1913, Man Ray’s gift and Indestructible object and most of all Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q 1919. I was looking at these simple combination of ideas that created art trying to figure out what to make for mine, then I got hungry and went to make dinner while still thinking about it, leading to my idea to combine two dishes into one edible “art” piece.
