I had a real culinary battle last night. There was stress. There was swearing. There was possibly a little
h-anger* involved. Yeah, yeah. If you know me well, you know that I swear basically all the time-- on an Easter Egg hunt. In the bath. At a buddhist retreat. So saying there was swearing doesn't say much. But still. Let me paint the picture: I was genuinely annoyed. And I blame David Lebovitz. Somebody get me that guy's address. Hate mail has been composed. Have you ever cooked artichokes? To be clear, I don't mean "steamed artichokes". That's a breeze. Little lemon, a bay leaf, a steamer basket, melted butter... Wait 20-30 minutes. La-de-dah.
Fancy appetizer,
Ooooh no. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about
cooking artichokes. Which takes roughly 12 minutes to do after you've spent 45 minutes hacking away at them with a machete.
David Lebovitz's
easy-to-do "
How To Prepare & Cook Artichokes" (if you've got nothing to do and you're trapped on a forgotten island) is, like, a 15-page long recipe, devoted almost entirely to prepping the artichokes for cooking. An ode to annoying. Part of my frustration is that I ended up making these nine-hours artichokes because I was making
this recipe. Which sounded both interesting and relatively easy. I'd never made freekah before, but I've been hearing good things, so I was into it. In David's recipe for this
freekah risotto with artichokes and bacon, he literally says "2 cups of sliced artichokes", which I foolishly took to mean "2 cups of sliced artichokes" rather than "A totally different, labor-intensive sub-recipe that will require far more of your time and energy than the primary recipe." I know. What a dunce.
When all is said and done, though, it was honestly so good. Especially the artichokes. So I'm probably going to make it again.
Maybe I shouldn't mail that letter off after all?
*hunger-anger
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