I’d always wanted to try cooking an artichoke, but found it all very confusing. What part do you eat?? Scott’s dad gave me one of his homegrown artichokes to experiment with, and well, I’ve finally figured it out.

This be yer artichoke.

Pull off all the tiny leaves at the base, and discard. Also use a vegetable peeler and peel off a few layers of the stem. Cut the stem shorter too.

Use scissors and cut all the tips off of the petals. I guess sometimes they are pointy? They weren’t sharp on this babby artichoke but I still did it, I dunno.

All trimmed up.

Use a knife and cut off the whole top of the artichoke so it’s flat. Then steam it flat side down. Mine was pretty small so I only steamed it for 15 minutes, but more normal sized ones would take 20-30 minutes. You can tell when it’s done when you can easily pull out a petal.

It’s ready! To eat, you just pull off the petals, dip them in butter or aioli or whatevs (seriously, artichokes are pretty much just dip vessels) and scrape the white soft stuff with your teeth. Don’t expect to get much from the leaves.

As you get closer to the center the petals turn into these weird thin white flaps. We didn’t eat those. Just keep pulling them off.

And eventually you’ll get to the crazy looking choke part.

Thankfully you aren’t supposed to eat the hairy bit. Just scrape it off with a spoon. The part that is left is what you can buy in jars from the supermarket. This was a bit of a revelation to me.

Slice it up and you can eat that part too.

Done.

“These things are just plain annoying. After all the trouble you go to, you get about as much actual “food” out of eating an artichoke as you would from licking 30 or 40 postage stamps. Have the shrimp cocktail instead.” – Miss Piggy