THE Way to Cook Artichokes

Artichokes. The first time I had a fresh one was on a SDSU baja trip, we picked some out of a field near Ejido Erindira that had been inefficiently harvested. My friend Clay boiled them up for an hour; we did the scraping the bottom of the leaves thing, I don't remember how we ate the hearts. I picked one a couple of days ago off of the plant we have at the community garden, and suspected there might be a better way to cook them.

my yellow Nishiki, and the huge artichoke plant

An aside. Someone put 7 of the first 8 Sookie Stackhouse (vampire) books in the freebin recently. I've been mainlining them for the past couple of weeks. Great fun, but it really set me back with cookbook reading, I'm currently reading "I'm Just Here for the Food" by Alton Brown, "How to Eat" by Nigella Lawson, and "Cooking by Hand" by Paul Bertolli. I'll likely do separate reviews of all 3 as they are great. Anyway, I hadn't read the Bertolli book in a while, but I seemed to remember it had a discourse on artichokes, and man, did it ever. His book is awesome, it would seem that we have a similar cooking philosophy. As for artichokes, he doesn't like boiling them cause all the flavour ends up in the water, so he has you save the leaves for soup, and then you cover the hearts in olive oil and simmer slowly. It uses a ton of olive oil, but you can use it later for salad dressing or whatever. I used some to fry up some red sauce. My house smelled unbelievable. The aftertaste in my mouth was so good I didn't brush my teeth last night! Best meal in a long time, which is saying something since we just went through 54 flour tortillas from Baja.... If you score some fresh artichokes any time soon, I implore you to try this. Recipe in pics:

Pull off the green leaves till you reach the softer yellow ones, trim the sides a little, trim the green off of the stem. I was operating on 1st principles, but was saving all the trimmings for soup, so wasn't that concerned about over-trimming.

Cut in half, notice the choke

Use the side of a spoon to scoop out the choke

Bag of green leaves

The original recipe called for 6 artichokes, submerging them in 6c of extra virgin olive oil. I sliced up mine so they would sit lower in the pan so I could use less oil. Also, I re-read the end of the recipe a little late in the process, you are supposed to cook them on uber-low heat, no bubbles. Didn't seem to hinder the love too much. Cook in oil for 20 min, then let them cool in the oil.
Rice, artichokes, red sauce warmed up in a little bit of the oil. Heaven.