An artichoke phase
I’m in an artichoke phase. I go years without having one then start eating them regularly.
Once or twice a week I steam an artichoke, remove each leaf, dip it in a little butter and salt and then pull the bottom of the leaf through my teeth, removing the soft, buttery flesh at its base. I see them cook artichokes on TV and they cut everything away but the heart and use that. It’s such a waste. True, it’s hard to eat an artichoke the right way but at the end, my plate piled with leaves, I feel satisfied.
And one artichoke will make a meal for me.
I know the origin of my artichoke appreciation: Three in the Attic, a movie from 1968. Christopher Jones (at his most beautiful) plays a womanizing student who sleeps with three different girls, played by Yvette Mimieux, Judy Pace and Maggie Thrett. When the girls find out he’s been sleeping with them all, they kidnap him, lock him in the attic and make him continually have sex to punish him. Yeah, some punishment.
It was a funny movie. Jones seduces one of the girls by telling her that he is gay and she sleeps with him to try to convert him. Jones muses that gay guys probably get more sex than straight guys because of girls trying to change them. If I saw Three in the Attic for the first time today I’d probably think it was stupid, but in 1968 I thought it was sweet and funny and sexy and daring, with its gay jokes and magic brownies and wheat germ on a platter to keep up the guy’s sex drive.
Anyway, at one point Jones and Yvette Mimieux’s character eat an artichoke, dipping the leaves in melted butter and slowing pulling the leaves through their mouths.
So I tried artichokes for myself and found I liked them.
I’m in an artichoke phase.
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© Alllie 2006
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