Playing with Our Food / Artichokes

Hi everybody! I don't have anything really great to share.

(Now THAT'S a winning first line, eh??)
Seriously, the recipe I have isn't really a recipe but more of a peek into the American obsession with fun food. I never really thought about how the rest of the world 'eats to live' while Americans 'live to eat' until I read a book called 'Hungry Planet'. Amazing. Huge picture book of a week's worth of groceries, in dozens of countries around the world. The differences were SHOCKING.

And it made me understand my foreign-born and raised hubby a little better.
But before I get to all that, I have a fun link for Jane Austen's Bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice!! As you can tell, I'll be celebrating all YEAR.

The Everything Austen Daily has some awesome links and articles to what's happening right now. Janeites, unite! (oooh, that rhymes)

 

Ok, back to playing with our food....

My husband hates the way Americans play with their food. And not just those cute little Pinterest ideas or laughing over inappropriate carrots we find in the garden.

          My sister unearthed these. Cover your eyes, innocent ones! These here are some romantically inclined carrots.

 And he doesn't mind food that is actually going to be devoured and enjoyed... Like these cupcakes. My girls started attending a book club and the first book was 'The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe'. The hostess made these . Aren't they adorable???
                                     
And the 'Jack Frost' cookies we made on a day we woke up to loads of frost were fine because the sprinkles and all were edible. So, no big grumbles were heard there.

But what IS hard for my husband is to watch Americans carve pumpkins (because a good pumpkin crop can get a family through the lean winter months in his native country) or make those little Christmas air fresheners from tangerines and whole cloves.

 

 It drives him bonkers when I make home made play dough. All that flour and salt! That should have been made into something edible! (He doesn't know about the cream of tartar. I won't tell him. That stuff is spendy.)

I don't even make little pretty batches like this...

Ours are the giant mega-batch that takes up an entire fruit bowl.

Ahhhh, play dough in the fruit bowl. The irony!

The more I thought about it, the more I realized we really DO love to play with our food. I like a dish that's fun to make... and fun to eat. It's not just sustenance, it's entertainment. It's definitely a sign of a wealthy nation when we prefer our food to be FUN.

 

Recently I decided to try artichokes. Why? No reason. Maybe because they were exotic and actually a vegetable that we hadn't tried yet. When I lived in California we ate them all the time. But I didn't think my kids had ever tried them and it might be... yes, fun!

This one was looking a little worse for wear. (Edna was quite skeptical. She told me that even trimming off the edges of the leaves was not going to make this an edible dish.)

After trimming, you gently pry the leaves from the heart. Spread them out so that when you steam the artichoke in a pan of water, each leaf will cook at the same speed. I added lemon to my water. Some people douse the artichoke with salt, pepper and oil before steaming, but I didn't.

About 15 minutes after steaming in an uncovered pot, the artichoke is soft and pliable. You can remove each leaf by tugging gently at the base.

(Side note: my husband's family cooks them by burying them in hot ashes for a few hours, wrapped in banana leaves. It sounds to me like the original crock pot.)

My daughter liked hers dipped in mayo and pepper. *shudder* I just salted mine. You scrape the tender 'meat' from the base of the leaves with a knife (or with your teeth, if you're like us and completely savage).

We cut into the heart of the artichoke to retrieve the very softest pieces. Here's the 'beard', and you can see how closely it's related to thistle down at the center.

My kids were in love with the innards because one of them asked what plant artichokes were related to... and of course we had to look it up. Apparently, they're a thistle! Cultivated for more than a thousand years, found wild in North Africa, improved by the Italians and passed around the world, the artichoke is really just a spiny, edible weed. :) Originally the size of a hen's egg and preserved in syrup, it's now the overgrown monster you find in the local grocery store.

 

   Anyway, back to the original topic, I'm learning to be more aware of how I prepare food and what I'm wasting just to provide a prettier product.

But still,  I can't resist a little 'entertainment' value in my meals. Here's a tea cup I was gifted recently.

 I don't think she and Edna are getting along. We'll have to see how this all works out. Perhaps dear Goldy is just too flashy for Edna.

So, what's your favorite 'fun' food? It can be edible or not, for eating or just decoration. We promise not to laugh! (Unless it's a pair of naughty carrots...)