Lesson 1 - Artichokes

This blog is going in a new direction. Farming for food. I do not mean buying a plant from a nursery with a fully formed orange, for example, ripe and ready to eat, planting it, and before any chance of screwing things up, slurping the delicious orange that someone else actually grew.  No, I am talking about growing some or a substantial part of the calories we need to sustain ourselves.  It would not be an unappreciated consequence of burning most of those calories in growing that food. Sort of circular, don't you think?

Lesson one, starting with the letter "A," is artichokes.  And the lesson is to pick the thistle flowers before the first hot day.  In an urban setting, it is like telling a newcomer to town to get off the subway stop before yours.  How do you know the next day will be hot?  How do you know your never-to-be-seen again friendly subway orienter will gracefully alight and you have gone one stop too far?

Artichokes, Cynara scolymus, in the Asteraceae or composite family, is a perennial herb that is growing to the size of a VW bug in our backyard.  The immature flower is blessed with bracts (modified leaves) and a heart. Steam for 40-60 minutes until the bracts can be separated with a mere tug. Bite away, scraping all you can from the bracts, happy that your adolescent orthodontic work gave you perfect alignment. Then embellish the heart with olive oil or retro mayonnaise  or nothing at all, and enjoy vegetable heaven.

But wait ONE MORE DAY, that first hot day, and the plant goes into procreation mode.  No more Mr. Nice Guy. No more sharing with the people that carefully weeded, watered, cultivated, and fertilized it all season long. They need to assure seed formation for next year. Every gram of sweet light green flesh is transformed in hours to an inedible tough fibrous base of a huge composite flower, ready to bloom, attract pollinators and form seeds.  We just enjoyed artichoke hearts with penne pasta, capers, preserved lemon and garlic, picked before the first hot day.  Magnifique. 

Too late...