My mom told me not to play with my food. So I drew a face on my hamburger.

Two dots of ketchup and a curve, on a toasted bun, at a kitchen table. That was the whole thing. It made her laugh, which was the point, and it turned out I liked making the food look like something more than I liked eating it.

Years later I'm still doing it, except now the hamburger is a griffin and it takes eight hours.

The rules

Everything on the plate is edible. No googly eyes, no toothpicks holding things upright, no plastic anything. If it's in the picture, you could eat it. That constraint is the whole craft — anyone can glue eyes on a bun, but making an eye out of an olive and a slice of cucumber is a different job.

Every recipe photo is a real plate. Built in a real kitchen, shot as it came out. Designs still in development are labeled as concepts until they've been built and re-photographed — a picture attached to a recipe is a promise, and it should be a real one.

Drawings are labeled as drawings. The illustrated versions — the coloring pages, the things printed on t-shirts — are clearly art, and they never pretend to be dinner.

Before this

For a year and a half I taught art and animation to autistic kids and adults. When a computer wasn't the right tool, we did stop-motion instead — moving real objects a fraction of an inch at a time, one frame at a time, until they walked and danced and told a story.

That's where the cards come from. Three steps, always in the same order. A picture of every ingredient. A clear line telling you which parts need a grown-up. Not because it looks tidy, but because that structure is what lets a kid do it themselves instead of watching somebody else do it.

It's also why the food is going to start moving. Stop-motion is the plan, and it always was.