Braised artichoke pasta

If the magazines have been inundating me with roast lamb recipes, it seems the bloggers choice for must-cook food of the moment is artichokes. In the last few weeks, I have read about artichokes here, here and here, among others. And then there was the posting from Smitten Kitchen for Artichokes braised in lemon and olive oil. Smitten Kitchen appears to be becoming my favourite source of new and unusual recipes. Her style of writing and photography is readable, pleasant to look at, passionate and practical and this recipe certainly demonstrates those characteristics.

So artichokes had been on my mind and when I saw a pile at the fruit and vegie store on Saturday, I was vaguely interested. They were pretty second hand looking - if Deb thought hers were rough, they had nothing on these - but they offered them to me for free (I did say they weren't great!), so it seemed a good opportunity to practice on this intimidating and complicated vegetable.

I have only ever tried to cook an artichoke once before and it was a dismal failure - I had no idea what I was doing and ended up throwing the artichoke away. Deb's pictures were so helpful and the method of cooking them first and then removing the choke made life much easier. Still, we were surprised at how much of the artichoke is thrown away. We had quite a production line going between us, but this is still a high-maintenance vegetable - it took nearly two hours to cook this. Our lunch of artichoke pasta was quite late in the end!

And they are lovely, very mild flavoured and absolutely not remotely similar to bought artichokes. Unfortunately, the effort to result ratio is a little distorted, so I don't think I would do this all that often.