Add This to Your List

I have never cooked cardoons.

This, as a standalone statement, feels slightly embarrassing, as though in having cooked my way through a healthy amount of cookbooks by now, I should have naturally run into recipes on rare, Italian, artichoke-like produce. 

This is not the case. Somewhere in the middle of those cookbooks, I missed the chapter on cardoons. Essentially a large thistle, they have an earthiness reminiscent of artichokes (and a name that summons, for me, a kind of boat rather than a vegetable). I maintain that my lack of experience with cardoons is not my fault: technically, they’re not widely available in markets where I live, and I never had an Italian nonna to braise them slowly for me, in a bath of fuity olive oil. (This is a tragedy for many reasons, first and foremost being my pasta-shaping skills. Or terrible lack thereof.)

Either way, consider them added to my list, and I hope yours too. Thanks to this article, now we’ll know what to do.

In Season: Cardoons from YumSugar