indigo continuum.

And we’ve come to our favorite — and, last! — color dinner: indigo continuum, or black to purple (skipping true blue, which doesn’t actually occur naturally in nature). Favorite because it’s the greatest of the color challenges, and the most visually striking, and because it’s full of opportunities to use exotic ingredients like black basil seeds and squid ink. And other delicious things, too, like mussels and beets, blueberries, blackberries and grapes, purple potatoes and purple carrots, cured olives and Chinese mushrooms, braised red cabbage and wine, wild rice and black rice and black quinoa, purple speckled kidney beans, pinto and black beans. Really, it’s quite well represented, this end of the spectrum.

This dinner saw purple cabbage slaw, roasted beets, homemade blue corn tortillas, wine braised meats, purple potato salad, blueberry pie, and an epic punch bowl of sangria full of deliciously purple and black things: blueberries, blackberries, cherries & grapes.

As we pulled together our own dishes–squid ink pasta dressed simply with olive oil and black Hawaiian salt, a black quinoa salad (with purple mustard greens, dried bing cherries, roasted pistachios and a honey balsamic vinaigrette), spicy black bean dip, basil seed lemonade, and black sesame and orange peel ice cream from the pages of Serious Eats–we found ourselves with many purple-and-green ingredients. Perhaps the next round of color dinners will be color combos?

But first, to feast!