Artichokes.

Most of you know my love for asparagus. There is no other vegetable that I love as much as that pretty green stalk of goodness.

But, another green veggie does come close. It's the artichoke.

In fact, I love the artichoke so much, I have this hanging in my kitchen:

(Carciofo is Italian for artichoke. I had to look it up after I bought it.)

While I do love throwing a can of artichoke hearts into pastas and other recipes, my favorite way to eat artichokes is to simply steam them.

Artichokes can be kind of pricey, depending on the time of year you buy them. I bought the artichokes pictured in this post for $1 a piece!!!! That is quite the deal.

I realize that artichokes seem to be an intimidating vegetable. Yes, each of those leaves have a little prickle at the end that can be painful, but you can always just snip off all the tips. But, I promise you, this is a delicious and easy side dish for any meal.
Take the artichokes and put them in a steamer. You can always boil them too, but we always steam ours. We steam ours for 30-45 minutes, depending on the size of the artichokes. Smaller ones only need about 30 minutes, but huge ones might need 45 minutes until they're tender.
We ate our artichoke with meatloaf. Artichokes are surprisingly filling, so when we have them, it's our only side dish.
All you do is take off each leaf...
dip it into the dipping sauce of your choice (we either have hollandaise sauce or melted butter with garlic powder and garlic sauce mixed in with the butter) (and, yes, that's my multi-vitamin)...
and then use your bottom teeth to get the artichoke "meat" off of the leaf.

Elisabeth is showing how she got all the white meat off the leaf.
Julia is too young to properly eat artichokes, but she felt left out and asked me to take a picture of her eating an apple.
Once you've eaten all of the leaves, then you're ready to eat the artichoke heart!
You take off all the little leaves that are left.
See all those pretty hairs? Those are called the artichoke's choke. It is called that because if you ate those pretty little hairs, you would...choke. It's pretty self explanatory.
So, take a knife and get off all those prickly hairs.


This is the heart. And it is the best part.
You can eat the whole thing once the choke is off.
I dip it in the sauce. Mmmm....
Elisabeth started eating artichokes with us when she was about 4. Now we have to buy her her own because she was stealing all of ours and there's nothing I hate more than someone stealing my vegetables.