A is for Artichoke :: Vegetable Discovery Series :: Comedy Open Mic Round 18

Artichokes.

Just what the hell are they anyway?

Answer: Nobody knows. Class over.

Seriously though. Who invented these things? Who goes out of their way to eat an artichoke? When I sit down at my favorite restaurant, my eyes don't wander over to the Artichoke section of the menu first. In fact, unless I'm eating at McArtichokes or Artichoke Garden or International House of Artichokes, I'm not expecting to see these pointy weaponized vegetables on the menu at all. Nobody sits down, sips their frosty Bud Lite, and thinks man, I'm really in the mood to eat a hand grenade.

I bought an artichoke once. Once. It was awful. I didn't know what to do with it. So I had to Google for instructions and recipes, like all guys do when they have to cook something they originally planned to eat.

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Pro tip for future food purchases if you're a guy: If you are going to need instructions on what to do with it, don't buy it. Stick to things you can make in a microwave if you actually plan on putting it in your mouth.

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In this case, apparently eating babies are better. Baby artichokes, that is. The little babies are much easier to work with. Too late for me, however, as I was sitting there with a giant basketball sized piece of produce that resembled an ankylosaurus.

I stared at it.

It stared back at me.

I continued to stare at it.

It continued to stare back at me.

I stabbed it in the face.

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According to Google, that is indeed the proper way to get started if you intend to eat an artichoke.

Additionally, here are the things to note about preparing an artichoke for eventual consumption:

• You want to eat the heart, nothing else: Ok. So we're eating baby hearts now. Brutal.
• They have bitter fluids, so wear gloves: Sounds like they're talking about when I touch my wife, but they are in fact referring to artichokes.
• You have to peel off the scaley spiky bits on the outside first: It's much like peeling open a Snickers candy bar before feasting on the sugary goodness within. Except it takes much longer and the effort is not worth it.
• Cut off the stem: Literally, there's going to be nothing left of this thing to eat. We're cutting off like...all of it. Probably for the best.
• Remove the choke: I don't know what this is either, but I think it's the stuff in the middle that would have grown up to be a flower if we had left it alone in the wild to be free and bloom with its family, but instead we kidnapped it like a thief in the night in order to torture it and dismember it.
• Clean the artichoke heart, then soak it: In lemon water. So it doesn't go brown and funky while you sit back and consider why you wasted an hour of your life cleaning this thing when you could have had a pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less.

_{Artichoke dad consoling baby flower after mom was plucked by goons in the night}

Step 897: Moving on with your life

After you've discarded the shrapnel of your artichoke dismemberment experiment and are reconsidering all the decisions you've made in your life thus far and are staring at a moist chunk of what you hope is an artichoke heart, it's time to wrap things up and prepare the glorious meal God intended you to make when he placed that artichoke in front of you at the grocery store.

Next: Cooking the damn thing

What, you mean after all that, dinner still isn't ready? Who am I trying to impress here? There are no women watching. Pizza sounds really good right now.

You can always tell the ladies later how great your cheesy artichoke heart casserole or whatever turned out.

Yeah. Go ahead and slide all your artichoke pieces into the trash. I didn't see anything.