So tonight, I spent an hour with four artichokes.
As my colleague John Lethlean admitted in his recent Age column, I've also avoided bringing artichokes into my kitchen. First and only other artichoke experiment resulted in them totally collapsing on me as I pared away, and pared away.
Yesterday though, they looked so tantalising in the fruit and vegetable shop ...
And so tonight, I spent an hour with four artichokes. Marcella Hazan's Classic Italian Cookbook spread out before me. Studying her illustrations, lemon halves and acidulated water everywhere.
And it all seemed to go really rather well. Rubbed a paste of mint, parsley, garlic, salt and pepper outside, and inside where the nasty choke once was. Laid them in a saucepan with olive oil and water. Wet cloth over the top, then the lid. Marcella told me to cook for up to 40 minutes. The aroma? Magic... The apartment filled with a divine, garlicky-minty fragrance and I was happy.
I returned to the distressing online search for a decent and affordable new apartment to rent in Sydney. (To afford an inner-city place remotely equivalent to home now, I'll have to live on potatoes and cabbage, darn holes in my socks, turn collars inside out or whatever you do with them, abandon shoe shopping, French cheese shopping ...)
My attention wandered from Surry Hills to Bondi, Glebe to Alexandria. My attention was not on the stove.
Not a mistake a smart cook would make. (Not a mistake the chefs who will be hired by Jamie Oliver to cook at his new UK high street chain of "neighbourhood" restaurants serving "authentic Italian" food would make.)
But knee-deep in real-estate anxiety, I let my artichokes, the hour-long artichokes, burn dry. Mush they were, mush.
And my hands lemon-shrivelled and my artichoke-confidence shattered.
