Steaming and Eating Artichokes, a Beginners Guide!

The current glut in my vegetable garden is artichokes. A very nice glut to have. I'd never eaten a fresh artichoke until last year, I liked the little artichoke hearts you can buy in tins and jars and thought I'd give growing them a go. I hadn't realised how much more there is to eat from an artichoke than you get in the jar & bottles. The "petals" are delicious, if a bit fiddly to eat. It's like a reverse tardis vegetable, there's so much more of it left when you've finished eating than when you started. Saturday artichoke lunches have become our July ritual, so we can devote the required amount of time to eat and enjoy them.

I'm almost embarrassed to share my favourite artichoke dip recipe, because it hardly counts as a recipe. It's as delicious as it is simple, although I suppose if you want to be really good you could make your own mayonnaise.

For the dip :
2 cups of mayonnaise
2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar

Mix together.

Really, that's it - delicious dip, done.

The artichokes themselves aren't much more complicated but it'll make me feel like this blog entry is more of a cooking based one if I share how to do it for those who haven't yet tried.

Au-naturelle, straight from the garden the petals of the artichokes have pointy thorned ends. Snip these pointy end bits off with scissors for the larger petals (see photo on left). If you're buying them fresh the seller may have done this bit for you. Cut off the stem so that it's almost flush with the base so it can sit upright during cooking. Add a little squeeze of lemon juice and a couple of bay leaves to the pan and steam until you can pull a petal off easily (usually somewhere between 25 - 45 minutes depending on how big they are). So, now you have perfectly cooked artichokes, how to eat them? Pull off the petals one at a time, dip the fat fleshy end into your dip, put it in your mouth and pull it through your teeth to extract the pulpy flesh inside. When you've eaten all the petals, you're left with the inside. Use a spoon or a knife to remove the fibrous fuzzy part called the choke. That bit isn't edible. Add it to your pile of detritus from the petals! What you're left with underneath all that fibre is the heart, which you can then cut up and use to scoop up the last of the dip.