On a dream Spring Break Vacation in a house overlooking a coastal marsh I got the chance to make dinner with my friends for a fantastic group of guests. Our crowd included some charming guys from Sewanee who were happy to assist. We wanted to create a special appetizer to start our feast and got inspired by the artichokes at the local market. It would have been easy to just steam them, melt some butter and call it a day, but it had to be just a little more impressive for our celebration.
We decided that stuffed artichokes would wow the crowd and guess what – it was a hit all the way around. Even our one non-artichoke eater ( yes my own husband) couldn’t resist. I mean who could! We made our stuffing with Italian bread crumbs, tons of garlic, chopped parsley, lots of parmesan cheese, and pulled it all together with olive oil and fresh lemon juice. Here is a confession, you can measure out the ingredients with the greatest precision, but you’ll end up tasting and adding a bit more of something.
Make sure you have a good pair of kitchen shears or at least a pair of scissors to snip the leaves and besides a mixing bowl and baking pan, nothing special is involved. I thought my knitting scissors might have to be sacrificed, but a thorough kitchen search revealed not only kitchen shears, but some of the weirdest knives I’ve ever seen. That’s part of the fun of cooking in a vacation house, you come up with creative ways to cook.
In fact, we were working with a slightly finicky oven and had to finish our dish in the microwave. No problem the stuffed artichokes were so delicious my friend who is writing with me now is going to see if there are any lefts overs. Pause…..apparently not. Darn!
Ingredients
4 artichokes
3 cups Italian bread crumbs
1 cup grated parmesan cheese
6 cloves garlic, minced
½ cup fresh chopped parsley
½ tsp salt – more to taste
½ tsp red pepper flakes
Juice of one lemon
½ cup olive oil, plus extra to drizzle
Directions
Preheat oven to 375.
Cut the bottoms off of artichokes, snip sharp leaves, and trim the tops.
In a large mixing bowl, combine remaining ingredients.
Pull artichoke leaves apart enough to stuff and with your best kitchen tool – your hands – stuff the artichokes, using all of the stuffing.
Put in a baking pan and pour a bit of olive oil, about - a tablespoon over each artichoke.
Bake until leaves are soft enough to pull and eat, about an hour. (Disclaimer here: our tricky oven was slow and we finished ours with 8 minutes of time in the microwave.)
Serve with extra lemon slices if desired.
Thanks to guest photographer Dallas Snyder for his excellent vision.
