#fartichokes

[reach-for-the-light]

I FIGURED OUT WHY ARTICHOKES ARE CALLED FARTICHOKES

it's not a joke a teenager trying to be funny made.

It's a BLEEPING WARNING

One of which I did not heed

It stalked me in the night

Cackling like I couldn't read

I couldn't even put up a fight

Forced onto the white throne

Curled up, shaking, and prone

All the bleeping gas kept coming

At 5 am, I'd rather be sleeping.

3 more in the fridge are threatening

Their deliciousness is beckoning

But mam, but mam, do not waste food!

I made myself a trap for dinner, no good!

[bleepboopgrow]

So i fried some of these figuring it would help with stomach side effects.....

Nope! Currently on the toilet having my stomach wrecked

[shreddertakethewheel]

jerusalem artichokes

this is the back garden bed we have inherited from the previous tenants. we have damn near no idea what most of this stuff is.  we decided that we would have to reclaim the bed altogether. 

we went and bought a shovel for the task - i enjoyed carrying it around so much i had to take an intense selfie about it.  i kept saying "oh look! look!!i look so employable and like-i-have-skills when i carry this shovel around! don't i look not-useless???"  i was getting a big kick out of it. ultimately dave did most of the digging..

  most of the stuff we couldn't even identify, save for a lot of big weeds! t recognized one thing for certain - parsley. we dug up that little plant to save in a smaller container, hopefully it will survive it's transplantation. 

when we pulled up the dried out old flower sticks in the back right of the bed, there were a million little tubers attached to them - they looked like red ginger, all nubbly and gross, not like anything i'd ever seen before... poison? 

i send kelly a photo and she said probably not poison, probably JERUSALEM ARTICHOKES. i did some research and decided that that was almost definitely what they were; apparently they grow quite readily in vegetable gardens, to the extent that they are difficult to get rid of!

apparently their flowers look lil this, but it being november and all, they were pretty far past that point.  (photo from ubanartichoke.com ) 

people said they were delicious, but people also said they give them a lot of GAS and sometimes even worse symptoms.   like so much so that they call them "fartichokes!"  some people said they absolutely would not eat them because of their ill-effects, others said they eat them with no trouble, or that tooting is a small price to pay to enjoy such a snack.

http://www.bonappetit.com/columns/the-foodist/article/do-jerusalem-artichokes-cause-diarrhea

http://www.gourmetgardening.co.uk/2013/03/the-joy-of-fartichokes.html

So I did what anyone would do - i prepared some for eating! Some articles said peeling the skin and cooking them for a long time would make them more digestable so i decided to make a gratin.

it looked like that but that's a photo from food.com of someone else's.  i didn't have all the right ingredients so i had to improvise - honestly it didn't turn out very good or delicious - with the missing ingredients and my own fear of the weirdness of the fartichokes, i did not enjoy it at all.  i don't think dave really did either.  our gratin was watery and thin - some had recommended this recipe, but perhaps we should have tried the chokes in a different way - some ate them raw, mandolin-sliced in salad?

we were not sick or unhappy in bed that night, but we were pretty gassy! it took about four hours before we felt any ill-effects but when they came on we had a few laughs.

we are not dying to eat them again now so i gave a bag to james and nichola and alex! we told them what they were all about so we'll see if they rise to the challenge.  

apparently they are terrifically difficult to remove completely from your garden, so we'll see if we end up with more next year maybe? if so, we will try again!