Sometimes it’s okay to play with your food.

Most people when chopping up fruits and vegetables won’t think twice about the scraps, stems, and peels as they scoop them up and throw them in the trash. There are some people who may find a number of uses for those scraps, like boiling them up to make a nice vegetable stock or adding them to their compost heap to help nourish their garden. However, it’s likely that not many people at all look at the chopped ends of vegetables and see beautiful art inspirations, but Twitter user @yo_yo_yo_u is an exception to that.

Recently, when she was chopping up some komatsuna, or Japanese mustard spinach, she noticed that the base of the stems near the root look very much like a rose. If you’ve ever sliced off the ends of a bundle of spinach or bok choy you may have noticed they look similar as well. But instead of just admiring one of nature’s fun little coincidences and moving on, @yo_yo_yo_u took that komatsuna rose and used it a stamp.

▼ “Since the cut base of komatsuna looks like a rose, I used it as a stamp.”

The stamped komatsuna looks just like a lovely red rose, and with one of her signature cat drawings along with it, the end result is adorably creative. As some commentors mentioned, they had noticed the similarity before but never thought of using the komatsuna stems as a stamp. Many were also quite impressed with the idea:

“For a smaller rose you can use spinach stems”
“I’ve thought that it looks similar to a rose, but never thought of using it as a stamp. That’s so neat!”
“Nice idea!”
“Wow, how neat! I wish I had your imagination (*^^*)”
“I see these almost every day but never noticed.”
“Subarashii” (Subarashii means “wonderful” but this was written with the kanji 薔薇, read as bara, the Japanese word for “rose”.)

Komatsuna makes a tasty and healthy addition to a bowl of ramen, and is even great just lightly stir-fried, making it an all-around versatile veggie!

Source, featured image: Twitter/@yo_yo_yo_u