Nick's Nasti Salad Soup

Anything can inspire a dish. A painting, a comfort-food craving, a slab of purple-red tuna belly sparkling behind the counter at the seafood shop. This lilypad-invoking creation was inspired by nasturtium, a peppery plant with edible red, orange, and yellow blossoms.

Funny thing about nasturtium: You'll find it prettily packaged at high-end farmers markets, sure. But, as any dedicated urban forager will tell you, it also grows wild and wildly. Nasturtium plants (which we lovingly call "nasti's") spring up in the forlorn grass patches that line parking lots or hide beneath underpasses. They pop up in untended gardens and public parks. When we started looking around Seattle, we saw these prodigious plants everywhere, and often in places that have little in common with the well-scrubbed produce section of your local Whole Foods.

This irony that such scrappy, hardy greens are treated like precious delicacies by tweezer-toting chefs also inspired the dish. Because as elegant and haute-cuisine as it appears, it's easy, fast, and surprisingly versatile: Scallops at the supermarket look sketchy? Use hamachi or albacore tuna instead. Plums out of season? Sub in apricots or another durable stone fruit. 

There are all sorts of variations you can do with this particular plate-up, which is why we included it in our free "Design a Dish" project, which you can find at chefsteps.com. If you're new to creating composed dishes, you can use it as a primer, testing how small variations change the texture and flavor contrast, as well as the overall look. Once you've tried this one a few ways, work through the steps to create your own original dish.