Complex Numbers

Artichoke

I bought an artichoke at the grocery store last week.

This was harder than I had anticipated. As I approached the store, the sky turned green and lighting was crackling all around. My goal was to get in, grab some margarita mix, a lime and a few other essentials, and get out.

While I was getting the lime, I saw a few artichokes on display - the biggest, fattest, greenest artichokes I've ever seen. I grabbed the biggest of them; it had a tag around the stem that read, "ORGANIC ARTICHOKE" along with a PLU code. I got the 'choke, the lime, some margarita mix and a few other essentials and got to the self-checkout line.

I started checking out. The PLU code didn't work. There was no option for "artichoke, organic" on the self-checkout screen. I waved at the attendant.

"What's that?" she asked.

"Artichoke."

"Huh. It doesn't look like an artichoke."

It looked like an artichoke to me. I read the PLU code off of the tag for her.

Just then the power blinked, and the self-checkout screens quit working.

I hung around for a bit, but the attendant had run off to do something else and nothing I was doing would work. There was no way the self-checkout would let me check the beer out without the attendant, so I grumblingly picked everything up, put it back in the basket, and went to wait in one of the two 5-deep lines at the regular checkout.

After a half hour of power blinks - at this point, the rain was coming down like Armageddon, so I wasn't going anywhere, anyway - it was finally my turn. The normal registers were working fine, but everyone else had like 60 items, while I had six. I resisted all the candy and such, had a few good chuckles at the stupid-ass tabloids, and when it got to be my turn I whipped out my Kroger card and my credit card.

"What's this?" said the checkout dude.

"Um, it's an artichoke. Has a label on it."

"Oh. It doesn't look like an artichoke."

I squinted; I didn't have my glasses. But it still looked exactly like an artichoke to me. A particularly large specimen, mind you, but... artichoke.

The rain had reduced to a trickle by the time I was done; I went to the liquor store for the rest of the margarita fixins, and went home. The artichoke went into my fridge.

Today, I finally took it out. It still looked like an artichoke, but I could tell that if it waited in the fridge much longer, it would look like a biology experiment, which is more my wife's field. So I trimmed the stem, took off the label, pulled off the most outer bracts, and put it in a half inch of water in a casserole dish and nuked it for five minutes.

When it was done, it still looked like an artichoke, albeit a cooked one. Smelled like one, too. Not the best odor in the world, mind you; they taste a lot better than they smell.

My dad taught me how to eat artichokes. Of course, my mom always overcooked them, like she did everything else, but overcooked artichoke is mostly just more tender. What you do, he explained, is pull off the bracts, dip the base in some sauce (I use a lemon juice, olive oil and pepper mixture; others use more elaborate dressings) and use your teeth to scrape off the tender inner surface. You do this, going around the golden-ratio spiral of the bracts, until you get to where they start to look like the flower petals that they are. Then you pull off the flower petals and scoop out the coarse spines, which reveals the tasty heart. This, too, gets dipped, but you eat it whole.

It's a lot of work. More work, I suppose, than some people think it's worth; I happen to disagree. And I've been to restaurants (The Raven in Virginia Beach, one of my favorite places to go when I'm in that area) where they offer it as an appetizer, with hollandaise sauce. I've seen people at the next table send it back.

"I don't know what this is," they said. "It doesn't look like an artichoke."

People: It's. A. Fucking. Artichoke.

Oh, and look, there's even an artichoke liqueur:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynar

Wow, an alcoholic beverage I haven't heard of. Who says Wikipedia is useless?