Cooking with Artichoke - Antipasto Pizza!

Hands up if you have cooked with artichoke before? No? Me either! I had a request on Facebook to give it a go, and as they where on special at Coles for just $1 I though "why not"! I know some of you obviously will have used it, and know much more about it than I do but it was definitely a new experience for me and to be honest not something I will probably cook with regularly. 

It is a nice, quite a mild flavoured vegetable, not unlike asparagus but it was a bit of mucking around to cook it.

I decided to use it on top of a antipasto type pizza along with my homemade pizza base, homemade pizza sauce (tin of tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, basil, oregano, salt cook until liquid has reduced), olives, semi sundried tomatoes, salami, red onion and homemade ricotta.

Cooking Artichoke

Ingredients

1 artichoke, with the stem chopped off as per the above picture, clip any very dry or rough point bits off with scissors

Juice from 1/2 a lemon

1 bay leave

Method

Put all ingredients in a pot of water.

Bring to the boil then reduce to a medium/low heat and simmer, with the lid on for up to 45 minutes.

Once nice and soft remove from heat and leave to cool.

Pull the "leaves" off (are they called leaves? I am not sure) and scrape the softness from the inside of the leaves

I am pretty sure you can eat them as is, scraping the soft insides off with your teeth. I was a bit lazy here I will admit, I pulled most of the leaves off until I got to the nice soft heart which is the bit I mainly used. I just ripped it up and put on top of the pizza. I probably didn't use as much of the artichoke as I could have, it made me a bit nervous haha!

I might get a few more and try marinating them to eat on a platter, but I did read after cooking you can use like a chip for dips so that might be an option as well!!

It was a really nice flavour on top of the somewhat salty pizza.

In conclusion I feel like I failed a wee bit with this challenge. I am sure that there is a lot more to artichokes than I gave it credit for. 

Do you have any good artichoke recipes you can share with me? Would love to give it a go again doing something different!

Happy Cooking (from scratch!)

Erica xx