Whole Roasted Artichoke

As some of you know, I only eat meat, cheese, vegetables and nuts.  Sometimes I go a little crazy because my diet is so mundane.  That happened last week when I started looking up some different lists of vegetables.  I needed variety!  That's when I found this recipe for how to roast whole artichokes. I have never eaten an artichoke that I know of so I needed a step-by-step guide and this website provided all the steps.  It was perfect.

I pretty much followed her instructions as is except I used 3-4 cloves of garlic because I love garlic.  Yum! 

Here's my artichoke.  They are weird looking aren't they...and it's sort of weird that parts of it are inedible.  

Here it is after roasting for an hour and fifteen minutes.  It looked gorgeous to me.  I did wait about fifteen minutes before I even opened up the foil.  You can't be in a rush with roasted artichoke, that's for sure.  Even so, I burned my fingers and my mouth as I consumed it and  the roasted garlic was delicious. 

Here is the artichoke after I've eaten most of the "meat."  I thought it looked pretty; like a flower. 

Here's the inside hairy part.  Artichokes are so weird!  So you pull off the hairy part and eat the heart of the artichoke.  That was, by far, the best part (besides the roasted garlic).  I enjoyed the artichoke but I'm not sure how often I'll make this, especially since it takes a lot of time (an hour and a half) to cook and cool and there's not too much to actually eat, at least it didn't feel that way.  I did appreciate the new experience and am happy to say that now I know I like fresh, roasted artichoke.