INGREDIENTS

INSTRUCTIONS

Have a large bowl at hand, containing cold water and the juice of two
lemon with the four halves of the rind. Keep the artichokes in another bowl
of cold water while you are working on them. Take one artichoke at a time,
drain it, and pull off and discard the smallest outer leaves. Holding the
artichoke with its bottom toward the little finger of your hand, tilt the
top away from you, and holding a small sharp knife tightly with your right
hand, insert its tip, one leaf deep, into the tender, lighter part of the
leaves. Keeping your right hand steady, slowly rotate the artichoke with
your left hand so the bottom moves in a clockwise direction, and cut upward
in a spiral. The tough part of each leaf will fall off, while the tender
edible part remains attached. Peel the green layer off the bottom and stem,
and then drop the trimmed artichoke into the lemon juice until you are
ready to cook. This operation requires some practice; you will know if you
have mastered this technique when the artichoke thus cleaned looks more or
less like the one you started with, only smaller and whiter.
If you are not ready to use the artichokes immediately after you have
cleaned them, try to keep them completely submerged in lemon water. This is
not easy. Artichokes are very buoyant and float to the surface making it
difficult to keep them covered. An inverted plate, just a bit smaller in
diameter than the bowl, place over the artichokes, will keep them below the
surface. Another way is to crowd them inside a glass jar and cover them
with the lemon water. If you plan to leave them at this stage for more than
a hour or so, you must refrigerate them, but it is not advisable to keep
artichokes this way for more than a few hours. Lemon is used to prevent
discoloration; on the other hand, the lemon will cause the artichokes to
spoil very quickly."
From Gemini's MASSIVE MealMaster collection at www.synapse.com/~gemini

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