Artichoke Heart Appetizer

In French it’s called “coeur d’artichaut” (cur dahr-tee-show) and it sounds much better than artichoke heart, doesn’t it? Better than “Arty choking someone’s heart?”

This recipe, which I got from the Madame Le Figaro cookbook, is pretty, elegant, easy to make, and tasty.

You need artichoke hearts. The recipe says to cook 4 artichokes and remove all the leaves, but . . . that seems like a lot of work to me if you’re not going to enjoy the dipping the leaves in the sauce, doesn’t it? If you have no idea how to prepare artichokes, you can take a look at this post.I used frozen artichoke hearts – can you get those? And I boiled them for about 25 minutes in salted water. The package said that I could boil the whole kilo in just 12 minutes, but the hearts still seemed too tough. And in fact, even after 25 minutes, the larger ones needed to be cut through with a knife. You can decide whether you want to cook them to near-mush or not, but do test them by sticking a fork in the larger ones.

Set them on a foil-lined baking sheet.

And smother them with black tapenade. I used two jars of 90g for the whole kilo of artichokes.

Then add some dried tomatoes. I only put one, when the recipe called for 3, because I’m not a big fan of dried tomatoes. But I fear it was not as good as it could be if I had put the right quantity. The combination of tapanade, olive oil and goat cheese (chèvre) is rather oily-creamy and you need the pungent taste of the dried tomatoes to balance it out. I found myself looking for the ones with more tomatoes.

After you’ve put 2-3 dried tomatoes on top of each tapenade-smothered heart, place a round of chèvre.

Drizzle olive oil and sprinkle pepper on the top . . .

and put it under the grill until the cheese starts to melt.

And that . . . is it!

So easy. I wish my Internet problems were as easy to master! See you soon, I hope! 🙂

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