Those little dark half circles (middle pic) looking things are only on the last of several attempts at this saucer but the top center face where the food would be sitting looks a little strange no matter what. I used the connect the vertices method to clean up the face after subsurf on both the top and bottom face . I created a lip with an inset & raised bottom face just like the cup had.
Good question! The answer to this one is not obvious - you need to delete the top faces in the middle of the plate. What's happening is that the base is an enclosed solid while the outer part of the plate is one edge thin and not a solid. This causes weirdness because the normals don't know which way to point, which messes with the solidify modifier.
To solve this, delete those middle faces at the top so that the whole thing is a thin surface. Then extrude everything up to make everything a solid and delete the solidify modifier. That way you can move the center up and not have a dip in the plate where the bottom lip is.
Hope that helps!
THANKS Jonathan! I'll look at this in depth this afternoon when i'm working on Blender. Believe it or not I had a feeling it might be something like that & was planning on starting from scratch and trying a different approach but wanted to see what you thought first. THANKS SO MUCH FOR THIS COURSE! Its a bit intimidating but exciting and I'm already learning a lot! :)