(bright music) - [Rachel] Here in Seattle, a city famous for coffee, we have grown accustomed to that ubiquitous little heart swirled into the foam of our lattes.

But if you're able to see it with fresh eyes, that cup of coffee is a tiny work of art.

At Leon Coffee House, a Mexican cafe in the U District, they take latte art to the next level, delighting customers with their cute foamy creations and flavors like Horchata, mango, and Nutella.

Every mug is like a miniature gallery.

But these baristas aren't the only artists creating food and drink that's almost too beautiful to eat.

I'm Rachel Belle, host of Your Last Meal podcast, and longtime Seattle journalist and food writer.

Here on "The Nosh", we explore some of the region's most delicious stories.

Today's adventure?

When food becomes art.

(quirky music) Linda Miller Nicholson is a pasta artist.

She has made an entire career of creating beautiful edible art, powered by fruit and vegetable purees, the only thing she uses to color her vivid creations.

Butterfly pea flour for blue, harissa for orange, beets and paprika for red.

I visited Linda in her teaching studio to make some rainbow pasta magic.

- I started this journey basically because Bentley, my child, pasta was his favorite food at age four.

Vegetables were not.

I started putting the vegetables into the pasta dough.

And he got really excited.

He was like, oh, like, green.

That's great, you know?

But my favorite color's red right now.

Can you make red, you know?

And so it was like, oh, beets.

Can you make yellow?

I have always loved turmeric, so that was kind of a no brainer.

But Prince passed away and when Prince died it was like, I have to nail purple.

- I have to get the purple.

- I've got to do a proper homage.

So I always start first by cracking a few eggs into the blender.

Will you help us with our, nice, good technique.

- [Rachel] Thank you.

- Okay.

So, I was super excited to test the theory.

Will it pasta- - Purple.

- With blueberries, and this is what happened.

(blender whirring) By itself, it's just not, this just is not Prince Redland.

- [Rachel] Yeah, well at first it looks a little gray and then it gets a little purple-y.

- Exactly.

I mean, you sort of get purple.

But, so it was also the first color that I was like, I wonder if I'm like, look at the color wheel, basically.

And if I can use something that's adjacent.

I use beets.

I'm gonna start with just a couple.

Like, just watch what happens in the blender just by doing couple of those.

- [Rachel] Okay.

(blender whirring) - So even by adding just a teeny little bit of the other ingredient, it like, it really starts pulling purple.

Just use a little bit of the ingredient, a little bit more, a little bit more until you get the exact shade.

So now I've put all the rest of the purple.

Let's go purple right now.

- Okay, yeah.

(upbeat music) - So I am curious though, how it did go from, oh, I'm making this food for my son, and he's eating vegetables finally, to making really intricate, amazing pasta art and you know, making a living out of it.

Like, what are some of the early steps that got to you there?

- Sure.

Yeah.

Well, so fairly early on I had a publishing house reach out and they were like, this is a great idea.

You're taking it to a level that no one has really taken it to before.

'Cause people were definitely making green.

You know, simpler things like that.

But no one was making 25 different colors.

So they were like, can you put that on paper?

The process of writing the book very much helped to launch it in a career sense.

But also for me, there is a sense of meaning.

As much as I wanna make things that are beautiful, I also like to try to make the world a better place.

So if I can do that through this artistic medium, I will always choose that.

- [Rachel] I think it's a really interesting form of art in that it goes away.

You spend quite a bit of time making it, and then it's gone.

- It's like a mandala.

Exactly.

And I think philosophically that really hits me in the heart a lot because of the fact that nothing is meant to be forever.

Nothing is meant to fully be possessed or contained.

And I love the fact that it is this, like, it's about the process of creating it and it's about putting, you know, sort of all your love into it.

Like, I feel like food tastes better when it has your heart.

- [Rachel] Mine feels really good.

- Do you see how it bounced back?

You kind of pressed it and it's starting to come back to shape.

That actually, that's your indicator.

- It feels good.

Prince would be proud.

- Ooh, alliteration too.

Proud prince.

So let's wrap 'em up and then we'll get to making our rainbow sheet of pasta.

(light music) - [Rachel] How have rainbows come to define your life?

What is the rainbow to you?

- I feel that rainbows define everyone's life, whether they know it or not.

Rainbows are the raison d'etre.

I mean, the refraction of light into beautiful color.

What is not to love there?

I think that there is sort of sociocultural implications with the rainbow and being a massive ally and understanding what the representation of the rainbow means there is really fundamentally and intrinsically important to me as a human.

It ties so well into pasta because why stop at green?

Why not explore the entire breadth of the rainbow?

The world is composed of every single one of these colors, and not one of them should be discounted or ignored, - [Rachel] And nothing goes to waste.

The scraps get pressed together and rolled out, creating a marbled masterpiece that we use to make a luscious ricotta filled caramelle.

It takes hours to create this pasta, but the process is very satisfying.

And the meal is a mindful experience, as you marvel at every single technicolor bite.

Before I arrived, Linda made a gorgeous focaccia, decorated, of course, with a rainbow of vegetables.

- Oh, I feel like those look so good.

- Thank you for teaching me how to make rainbow pasta.

Oh yeah, we gotta cheese earrape.

- So that we can eat.

- So we can eat, yeah.

- Exactly, yes.

(light music) - [Rachel] This is brown butter and crispy sage.

- Just super simple.

Exactly, yep.

- I'm so excited to try.

- A little rolly rolly.

We get to enjoy the fruits and vegetables of our labor.

- Of our labor.

- I wanna make mine not hang off the fork.

Oh, well, it's just gonna be that way.

That's so good.

We did a good job.

- I think we did a really good job.

- [Rachel] Mm yum.

- Cheers.

- Cheers.

To eating the rainbow.

- To always eating the rainbow.

(light music)