The Artichoke Adventure

Every now and then we order a box of seasonal vegetables from a local farm (you may recall that I wrote about the farm box a couple of years ago). The box is made up of whatever happens to be growing at the given time. During certain times, the box includes a couple of artichokes. I had not seen artichokes before coming to the US but with globalization, it is possible that they are now available in India too. A quick google search brought up a few Indian sites that described the artichoke as a leafy vegetable (it is not the leaves that are eaten) so it is possible that it is still new to India. 

Artichokes have a long history of culinary use. They were cultivated by the ancient Greeks and the Romans. They are considered a delicacy. But the few times I tasted artichokes at restaurants, I was not particularly impressed. The texture was unpredictable with some pieces being tough as leather. So the artichoke was something we never really bought at the market. They look intimidating. We did not know what to do with them and their relatively high price may also have been a factor. 

The first time when we got the artichokes, we had to figure out how to cook them. I found out that most of the bud (it is the bud of the plant that is eaten) is inedible and must be discarded. It is the heart of the artichoke that is sought after. This is covered by a very fibrous and inedible choke (hence the name?) and surrounded by a whole lot of inedible petals that have thorny ends. It is a complicated vegetable. Or bud if you want to be technical. 

How did we decide that this gnarly ball of tough spiny petals is edible? It just boggles my mind. I can understand someone removing the outer petals hoping to find something inside. But if you end up with a fibrous core, surely you would have given up then. I think it must have been particularly difficult to find any other vegetable at that time. Maybe someone took it up as a challenge. Or it was a form of punishment to consume the artichoke and someone got really motivated to make it work! 

Human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. Many vegetables and fruits appear difficult to handle and  prepare but we have figured out how to eat them. The jackfruit, for example, weighs several kilos and requires power tools to cut it into manageable pieces and plenty of oil just to separate the edible pods if you want to avoid sticky hands and knife. The banana flower has layers of florets and the inedible stamen from over several hundred florets must be removed individually, a task, which was usually performed the night before with all hands on deck. Songs were sung during this to relieve the tedium, if I am not mistaken! Getting to the meat of the coconut requires removing the husk and breaking the shell first. Then there is the bitter gourd. The bitter taste should have warned us to leave it alone. But we somehow persisted. 

With the jackfruit and the pineapple, the fruit of the labor (pardon the pun) is immediately available. With others, more effort is required to cook the vegetable. If one were inclined to count calories, then the manual labor would justify the ultimate calories consumed considering that many of these things get loaded with fats and sugars in the cooking process. But there is the option to eat many vegetables raw without expending any effort. In fact, it may be contended that eating celery raw requires one to spend more calories than actually consumed by eating it. As Ogden Nash puts it, 'Celery raw develops the jaw'. 

To get back to the artichoke, we googled (what else?) to find out a way to prepare the vegetable. Most of the recipes recommended boiling the bud for twenty to thirty minutes and then removing the petals and the choke to get to the heart. Considerable fuel has to be spent in this process. Obviously cooking anything requires fuel but the payback seemed very small in this case. Moreover, just a couple of artichoke hearts are not enough for a family. And yes, you can scrape off the negligible amount of flesh at the bottom of each petal where it is attached to the stem but the whole experience turned out to be somewhat tedious and unsatisfactory and not worth the effort. The next time we received artichokes in the box we gave them to a neighbor. That I thought would be the end of our artichoke adventure. 

Recently I was watching TV and saw a chef prepare a stew with artichokes. It was a revelation. What impressed me most was the way he cut the artichokes. He first cut the top half off and then deftly removed all the petals with a paring knife. Finally, he sliced off  the choke leaving just the heart. All in a matter of seconds. I was quite impressed by the whole thing. I have no idea how the final dish tasted but none of the YouTube videos on how to prepare this funny vegetable showed this technique. Maybe we had used the wrong key words to search.

I am not quite ready to rush out and buy the artichoke considering that a dozen chokes can easily set you back some twenty bucks or more. One can of course buy them canned but then where is the fun in that? Perhaps the next time we get artichokes in the farm box, we will give them another try. In fact, I will even make it my new year resolution! 

Happy New Year! Enjoy your vegetables, of whatever shapes and sizes they may be!