Eating Artichokes

The other day artichokes were on sale at King Soopers, 2 for $3.  I bought two and took them home to cook the way Mom used to cook them:  cut off the tough stems; put them in a pot with salted water to cover (although the little dudes float, so covering them is an impossible quest); add chopped garlic (Mom used garlic salt instead); and then boil them to within an inch of their lives, for around 40 minutes. Chill them in the fridge for at least a day, then eat them cold for lunch with plenty of real, salty-lemony mayonnaise (Hellman's, not that sickly sweet Miracle Whip crap).

Eating an artichoke is a unique experience.  The boiling gives them a dark army green color.  You set them on a large plate so you have room for the discarded leaves, with plenty of mayo on the side, then you add another spoonful of mayo for good measure. Peel off one leaf at a time, dip the non-pointy end in just enough mayo to make it tasty, then scrape the soft green stuff into your mouth with your lower teeth.  Artichokes have kind of a vegetably, mayonnaisy flavor (some say they are merely an excuse for eating mayo--I've been known to eat cold leftover cooked broccoli the same way).

As you remove the leaves one by one, eventually you unearth a cluster of remarkably lethal-looking leaves in the center with pointy purple ends that can actually prick you if you're not careful.  You gather these together and pull them out of the remaining artichoke heart in furry little tufts, and then you're left with what my mother called "a delicacy," the artichoke heart.  And if you've been careful with your mayonnaise you have enough left to do it justice.

Artichokes remind me of my mother, who ate them with matter-of-fact gusto as if they didn't look like small green creatures from the planet Vegeton.  Sometimes I was allowed to pack one for my school lunch.  How the mayonnaise was preserved in my un-refrigerated little lunchbox so that it didn't kill me off with salmonella by the time lunch rolled around I'm not sure.  I do know that the other kids at my grade school, their lunch trays loaded with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and mystery meat, would gaze at me with a mixture of revulsion and admiration while I ate the artichoke in the time-honored fashion--just one of many things back then that earned me and my family an eccentric reputation in a small southern Indiana town in the early 60's.