What's that coming over the hill?

[venta]

Last weekend, ChrisC and I were wandering through the greengrocer's. Suddenly he looked over my shoulder with an expression of vague terror and exclaimed "What's that!?"


"Er," I said vaguely, "I think it's a globe artichoke."

There followed further questions. What do you do with it?

Well, actually, I have no idea. Approach it carefully and try not to make it angry, by the looks of it.

Anyway, we bought one and took it home in the hopes of finding out.

Some recipe-book browsing later, I had come to a conclusion: everyone expects you to be way more informed about artichokes if you're contemplating cooking them. Most started "trim the artichoke, and remove the hairy choke".

The who with the what now?

"Trimming" involved, I presumed, cutting off the long stem. How about the tough outer leaves? Er, probably not - removing them revealed tough inner leaves, and I started to suspect that I might have unravelled the whole thing before finding anything that wasn't tough.

I chopped the thing into wedges, and it became immediately obvious what the "hairy choke" was. Globe artichokes are full of... well, fluff, basically. In fact, given that the wretched thing seemed to be made entirely out of inedible, spiny leaves and fluff I was beginning to wonder if it was the greengrocer's idea of a joke.

Still, having de-fluffed it, I daubed the wedges with olive oil and put them in the oven. The leaves still seemd distressingly tough and rattly, and not like something that would soften on cooking. I dutifully left them in for 40 minutes and made some aioli in the blind faith something approaching food was going to come out.

Now, I'm sure you're smart, vegetable-aware people so you all know the punchline: the outer leaves (and indeed inner leaves) aren't edible, they end up baked all crispy. You peel the leaves off one by one, and scrape the tiny chunk of yummy real-artichoke from the bottom with your teeth. In the middle (one might almost say at the heart), there is a sensible-sized lump of roast artichoke. The leaf-scrapy bits are nice, but I can't help feeling that they're the vegetarian equivalent of kippers: lovely taste, but just that bit too much fannying around to be truly great.

On the plus side, a conversation I had with (I think) secretrebel over a decade ago suddenly made sense. We were chatting about what you call that extra plate you put on the table onto which to deposit the detritus of a meal... in our house it's a "bit plate" and is most commonly employed along with roast poultry dinners, so the bits and bones don't clutter up eating plates. In her[*] house it was known rather more sophisticatedly as an "ossuary".

But what call, I asked, did vegetarians have for an ossuary? One of the answers was "artichokes". And you know what? She's right. Just one globe artichoke between two[**] and suddenly we're hip-deep in bits of leaf. Leaves everywhere. We had to deploy an emergency bit plate halfway through.

[*] or, of course, possibly not her house. Possibly the house of someone else whom memory has confused with SecretRebel.
[**] we did have other stuff as well, that wasn't the whole meal, by the way.

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I think I've seen things-that-fit-this-category at some hotel breakfast tables - sometimes actual mini bins with flip-top lids and everything. I've definitely encountered them in pubs/restaurants in a debone-it-yourself fish context (though a plate is often provided to serve this function, which is more practical). And surely any sit-down restaurant serving moules frites would have to give you somewhere to stick the shells? Though come to think of it I'm not sure I've seen that served in the UK. Or crab, or lobster. Not that I eat such things myself (being vegetarian) but I do dine out with people who do.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I do dine out with people who do. ... which I do every other night, of course.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I had moules mariniere only last week in a UK restaurant; they came in a bowl, with another bowl upturned over the top which could then be used for the shells. I think I've had them elsewhere in a bowl on a large plate, which was big enough to accommodate the empties.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm familiar with a specifically messy meal (like moules frites) having its own bowl for the empties, I'm talking about a communal, general-purpose plate/bowl. Which I (possibly unreasonably) see as a different thing.

Mini bins with flippy lids I associate with the sort of low-rent joint that would give you things in paper wrappers, so I hadn't classed them in the same bracket either.

Certainly debone-it-yourself fish in pubs I'm used to trying to juggle the rest of my meal with a skeleton trying to get in on the act. The only course of action is to try and do it tidily, so it looks like something from a Tom & Jerry cartoon. Which doesn't really help with the problem, but makes me feel better (until someone drops an anvil on my head).

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

GrotPot - but it lives by the sink for the scraping of plates, not on the table.

Is also often not actually a pot, but a chipped plate, plastic tray that once held chicken portions, or other such improvised container that is itself on the way into the non-recyclables(*), so can be chucked out all in one, rather than washed up!

* Kent is a bit poo for recycling, compared to Greenwich who were fantastic. They won't let you put kitchen scraps in the green bin, and only take a couple of categories of plastic. Asda is poo and does not /label/ its plastic packaging by category, so even probably recyclable plastics get jettisoned. I have contacted them and told them this, and they have promised me it will be passed on to their packaging design people...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oh no, a GrotPot is quite a different kind of animal :) My parents' house has one of those too but (unusually) I don't think it has a name.

I'm very confused about recyclables in Ealing. We used to be on the green box/white bag scheme, which had one set of instructions for what plastics you could put in (most, excluding a few specifics). Now we're on the clear plastic bag scheme, into which you can put bottles (and nothing else, regardless of plastic-type). The advice given by people at the tip for the plastic recycling there is quite strange and variable (eg "any plastic so long as it's not too flexible").

I can understand that "bottles only" is a simple, headline way of explaining what can be recycled. But given that there is a perfectly decent numbering scheme for plastic-types already in existence, why on earth can't any recycling scheme use it (for those who care about the details).

And given that Ealing patently does recycle things that aren't bottles, why can't I put them in my clear plastic sack? (Up til now I have been doing, but a new leaflet tells me that any non-bottles will lead to the whole sack being chucked in with the rubbish...)

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

We have clear sacks for what I tend to call 'dry' recycling - paper, card, tins/cans, & types 1 + 2 plastic. Glass is verboten, and has to be taken to the bottle bank (I think this may well be because the plastic sacks aren't that strong, and the combined weight & fragile nature of glass could lead to problems - why they don't just have a recyclables wheelie bin I don't know)

Green bin is for garden compostable waste only - I do tend to put raw veg peelings in there too (especially if the veg has come from my garden to start with, damnit!) but per the blurb, it shouldn't have kitchen waste - so I assume they don't have the high-temperature municipal composter that Greenwich did.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ealing does do food/kitchen waste, but not for people who live in flats.

(This isn't as mad as it sounds. Technically, it's "blocks of more than 12 flats", and it's all to do with how long it takes the collectors to sort it all out. So people on the green box/white bag/food recycling scheme put out three different receptables, all of which are sorted/dealt with at the roadside.

By the time they'd sorted three containers each for our block of 30 flats, there'd be a tail-back halfway to Perivale. So we're only allowed the clear plastic bags which are thrown straight into the wagon, allowing it to move on quickly, and then sorted elsehwere.)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

We do have a recyclables wheelie bin, but we still aren't allowed to put glass into it. This is apparently because the council aren't allowed to thus infringe their pre-existing contract with the bottle bank operators.