Learn how to Boil Artichokes and Make Garlic Oil Sauce

Hi, I’m Amy Riolo. Today were making swordfish and eggplant bundles with artichokes, garlic and mint. Right now in this segment we’re going to make our artichoke garlic and mint side dish. And what we’re going to do that with are our beautiful baby artichokes which are sometimes called cocktail artichokes. And I was able to find adhere sitter. And we’ll need about baby artichokes for this recipe and I’ve got them all ready cleaned. So, what I’m going to do here is put them into a pot of boiling water which I’m going to add a little bit of salt to and I’m just going to submerge the artichokes right into them. These are so beautiful and the great thing about these little babies is that you can eat the whole artichoke. So, in there and then boiling, they’re going to be boiling for about 10 minutes. Let me tell you a little bit about these baby artichokes that I found. As you can see this is what they looked like when they’re close. Artichokes are the un-opened bud of the fizzle plant. So, they’re actually a flower bud. And that’s why when you open them like this, when you open the petals they have that beautiful flower like kind of appearance to them because that’s really what they are. In this an addition to being wonderful to eat, they’re full of iron and foliate. But what we’re going to do right now is I’m going to show you how to clean one and in order to clean these artichokes because these are the baby ones and these are so nice, you really don’t have to do a lot of work at all. You can just cut off the bottom peel off a few of the outer layers those tend to be a little bit more though and you’re going to see you’re going to get down to this beautiful purple color. Because these are so nice and small, we can just go ahead and cook them that way and eat them the whole way. Because these artichokes are so small, they’ll probably only take about five or 10 minutes to cook. So, were going to let them boil for five to 10 minutes. Now, we’ve just finish boiling our artichokes and we can tell that they’re ready when they’re fork tender and when the leaves start to fall off this way as we picked them up and as it gets harder and harder to kind of pick them up that’s when we know they’re done. We don’t want them cooked a 100% through because they’re going to cook a little bit more in the garlic and in the olive oil. And we saw a little bit of carry overtime. So I’m going to take them out this way and I’m going to drain them really well and you want to make sure that they’re drained really well and that they’re actually dry, because if water gets into the oil, it will make the oil splatter and we don’t want that to happen. So, we’re going to dry this off really well onto some clean kitchen towels. You could also use paper towels if you wanted to do this at home that way. I’m just going to make sure I blot off all of the excess water that I can. And you can feel how nice and tender these are, they really cooked up nicely and by squeezing them a little bit releases a little bit more of the water from the inside too. Just be careful because they can be a little bit hot to touch you want to make sure that you’re doing it with you’re kitchen towel and you’ll be absolutely fine. So those look great. Now, what were going to do is get our olive oil ready. So, we’ll come back over to the stove. We’re going to put our pan on the medium heat. So, I just added our olive oil here to the pan. I’m going to let it coat the bottom of the pan and I know when it’s ready to go when I start to some ripples in it and when I can start to actually smell the delicious flavor. So, I’m just going to wait for a minute here. Now that the olive oil is hot, I’m going to add our garlic. I’m just going to let it cook for a second in the oil. We’re not going to actually let it turn color, we’re just going to cook it until it begins to release a little bit of its aroma and then we’re going to add our artichokes right into it. If you let it cook until it turns color by the time you add the artichokes, it gets to be really dark and it will have kind of a burnt more acrid flavor and we don’t want that. We want it to be nice and fresh and garlic tasting for this recipe. So, this is how we’re going to add it. You can see some of our artichokes have already started to come apart because they’re so nice and tender and that’s absolutely fine. Now they’re starting to really simmer. Now, what you can do with this recipe in addition to serving along side our sword and tuna bundles is you can use this as a sauce for your pasta. You can have fresh spaghetti and you could mix that in with this after its already cooked al dente and then what you would want to do is toast it with a little bit of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese that would be absolutely wonderful. You could also add more vegetables in here like zucchini and asparagus that we talked about and made it kind of multi-vegetables into one pot and that would be very, very good tasting as well. See we have a little bit of a splatter here, it’s hard to get the artichokes 100% dry but that’s okay its not hurting anything. Now, we’re going to add our freshly ground pepper and our salt. You will need some salt in this recipe it really helps to balanced out the flavor of the artichokes and make it taste really good. And I’m just going to kind of coat the bottom of the pan over again. And I’m going to take the pan off the heat for a second because I’ve noticed that my garlic is turning color and I want to give myself a chance to turn the artichoke and let them cooked on all sides before I take them off the heat. So, I’ll turn my heat down a little bit and you can gauge it yourself as soon the garlic starts to turn, you definitely want to take it off the flame for a second, so that it doesn’t burn. Now I’m adding our mint, mint has a wonderful cooling, soothing properties. It’s great for digestion. It has Vitamin C and it’s not a garnish it’s something that you should definitely be very aggressive with if you’re cooking with your health and mind. You can use a lot of mint and get wonderful flavor from it. There are three different varieties of mint available. So, you can experiment and see which ones you like the best and which ones really enhance your meal. When we come back we’re going to plate up our swordfish and eggplant bundles with our artichokes, garlic and mint.