Today we tackled the fresh artichoke. I watched a video of how to prepare an artichoke in order to prepare myself for this task. The guy on the video made it seem easy, except for the removal of the fuzzy part (the choke) in the middle. The choke removal even seemed to be tricky for him. (Please watch it here at curious.com, because what we are about to show you on our veggie blog turns out to be not ideal.)

Lucie chose a recipe for parmesan stuffed artichokes from Las Vegas Food Adventures. She was really excited to get started.

She inspected the artichokes and decided that we should start with two and save the other two for a different recipe, so we cut all of the ingredients for our recipe in half.

We had seen in the video that you must rub the artichoke with lemon any time you cut part of it away to prevent the artichoke from turning brown. We had our lemon sliced in half and ready to go as we began to peel away the outer leaves and cut off the stem.

I cut off the top of the artichoke and carefully rubbed with with lemon to prevent browning. See that little purple spot in the center? The fuzzy choke beneath that is not good to eat.

I decided to cut out the fuzzy choke that was mentioned in the video before cooking. After all, all I had to do was scoop it out gently with a spoon, right? Or a high powered laser.

By this time, I felt that I must be doing something very wrong because I had a vegetable the size of a hockey puck left in my hand and a whole cutting board full of fuzzy stuff and discarded leaves. Dave walked through the kitchen at this point and decided he had better eat something else for supper, because “this looked too experimental”.

For artichoke number two, I decided to be more conservative with the cutting.

Josie could sense a disaster and came to try to help. She and Lucie worked on removing the outer leaves from the next artichoke.

We left the choke in this one, hoping to remove it after cooking, as the recipe recommends.

The girls stuffed them with the bread crumb mixture and we put them in the pan with white wine and chicken broth (which we used in place of water).

We covered them and put them in the oven for 45 minutes at 375 degrees. They came out looking and smelling pretty good.

Lucie could not wait to give them a try.

She was very enthusiastic at first, but soon decided that she would rather eat something else. She decided on a one thumb up and one thumb to the side rating. I got to eat the artichoke with the choke still in it. It tasted fine and the choke was easier to remove after being cooked, but it was still a bit of a mess. I had more of the leaves on mine, which you are supposed to use your teeth to pull the artichoke flesh from, before discarding the fibrous part. I didn’t love this process. Dave’s rating was “not too bad”. He and I both agree that we prefer the canned artichokes, both for ease of preparation and taste.

To summarize, these fresh artichokes made me tired. I am looking forward to another canned artichoke recipe this week.

Thanks for visiting,

Jen

P.S.

A few words from Lucie:

Today, we tried a new recipe.    I gave it one thumb to the side, and one thumb up.  I also tried raw artichoke.  I gave it two thumbs up.  I also liked helping Mama in the kitchen.  I learned that the artichoke is the bud of a big, green flower.  Once it blooms, it is no longer edible.  I wonder what it looks like when it blooms? (We looked it up and found this page with some very interesting artichoke information.)

 This is Lucie trying the raw artichoke.