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| OK, we are getting there! Here we have an artichoke all stuffed and ready to go. See how pretty this looks? It's perfect and ready for olive oil now :-) |
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| Mix up your olive oil mixture so the garlic, basil and all the tasty bits are mixed well throughout so it comes out evenly when you pour it. |
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| Slowly pour the olive oil onto the stuffing. |
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| Carefully work your way around each leaf getting the oil mixture into the stuffing. Don't over pour. You don't want to soak the stuffing, you just want a little bit of olive oil mixture in each stuffed leaf. |
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| There is the artichoke all trimmed, stuffed and dripping with olive oil. Now you are ready to steam them. Put them on a steamer as shown above. You want to make sure you have a short pan so the steam stays close to the Artichokes. Fill your pan with water from the bottom of the pan to the bottom of the strainer. Bring water to a boil and cover. |
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| Here they are after being steamed for a few minutes. |
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| ...and here they are after 45 minutes of steaming. Notice the darkening of the leaves. |
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| I like to use a shallow bowl for presentation as you see here. Be sure to have everything planned out so you can serve these hot. |
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| There is an extra bowl here for the finished leaves. I recommend red wine with this dish. Now, there is a whole process to eating these things which my wife and I will demonstrate below. |
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| When you pull off a leaf, it will look like this here. See how the stuffing totally covers the leaf? This is really delicious stuff. I'm getting hungry just looking at this! You can't see it, but there is a meaty part of the leaf at it's base that you scrape off with your teeth. Don't just scrape off the stuffing, bite down hard enough so you pull off the stuffing and the meaty part of the leave at it's base. You will figure this out after you have gone through this whole process once. |
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| After you have taken a bite, i.e. scraped it all off with your teeth, (you don't really bite, you scrape) the leave will look like this here. See how there is a portion on the bottom leaf that is not as shiny as the upper part? That's because there was a nice chunk of leaf meat there that is very yummy. When you have finished your leaf you just throw it into the extra bowl and then grab another stuffed leaf and just continue to eat and have nice conversation and enjoy some wine with it. Really quite lovely! This is a great meal to have with someone you love to spend some time with. Take your time while eating and enjoy some great conversation. Try it, you'll see :-) |
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| Mama Mia! that was some good stuff. You can see here we have worked our way down to the center of the Artichoke. The leaves get skinnier and skinner as you go. Eventually, they are too skinny to get any yummy leaf meat. |
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When you have gone as far as you can in regards to eating the leaves, you will end up with something like this here. Wow, what the heck is that? Looks like some body snatching alien pod of some sort.. Don't be scared, there is more delicious eating to go with this thing. |
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