The perfect, easy summer food is something you can prepare quickly, throw on the grill without tending and eat with your hands. Ergo, something healthy yet, comfort food-y and totally low maintenance like seasoned grilled artichokes is the perfect easy summer recipe!

Here’s how to make this lemon, garlic and pepper seasoned finger food!

Ingredients

• 3 whole lemons (or equivalent amount of juice–about 1/2 cup) OR one whole lemon per artichoke you want
• 3 whole artichokes (or however many you want)
• coarse ground pepper (whole with grinder is preferred)
• lemon pepper
• sea salt
• granulated garlic
• 3 bunches of garlic
• Steak seasoning mix (any kind will do)
• tin foil
• olive oil

Lemon, Garlic and Pepper Seasoned Grilled Artichokes Recipe

Firstly, WASH the artichokes. Use a colander, because you’re going to have to rinse these bad boys again. Trim the stem down to about an inch nub and discard or put the discards in a compost bin (be green!).

Next, take a pair of gourmet scissors (or scissors you don’t mind touching your food–so make sure they’re sanitized!) and clip off the thorns on the artichoke scales/leaves/petal thingies. Be careful not to cut or prick yourself. (It can hurt… or be really, really annoying.)

Then, with a serrated knife (I wish I had something better than a bread knife), slice off about an inch off the top.

When you have done all three or four (however many you plan on eating), kind of “pull” open the petals/scales a bit and run them under cold water again, and turn them upside down inside the colander to drain. You can probably just chill for like 5 minutes or so. Or, if you’re like me, you can rinse each after you’re done shearing the top off and let it drain while you go to town on the thorns on the next artichoke. Whatever floats your boat.

Fire up your grill…I wasn’t the one who turned it on, so I’m guessing medium-high heat. Alternatively, you can preheat your oven to 400–if you’re like me at my condo, and don’t own a grill.

Pull a sheet of foil big enough to cover a whole arthichoke from stem to tip if you wrap it up like a shiny little ghetto Christmas present.

Take about 4-6 peeled cloves of garlic (make sure you cut off those husky ends!) and stuff them into the “flower bud” part of an artichoke. (Like so.)

Drizzle about 1-2tbsp of olive oil onto an artichoke held over the foil. Use your free hand to smear the olive oil all over the sheet and then smear it all over the surface of the vegetable, too. Once the arti is coated well in oil, shake a generous amount of lemon pepper, granulated garlic, sea salt and grated black pepper all over the outside and inside of the thing. Make sure the seasoning gets down into the scales and into the inside of the veggie where you stuffed the garlic cloves. You want the flavor to penetrate into the meaty parts (that’s what she said!).

Don’t go overboard with the salt, though. You don’t want to over-sodium-ize this thing to the point it’s no longer healthy. At that point, you might as well just go for a bag of Lays. At most, use about 1/2 tsp of salt. No more than that! Shake some steak seasoning onto that bad boy, too.

Your artichoke should look like you threw it in sand.

Now that it’s all seasoned up, cut a lemon in half and squeeze the juice from both halves all over the arti, making sure the juice gets down into the bottoms of the scales, and into the middle of the vegetable where you jammed the garlic. It needs to soak down into the flesh.

Once that’s done, bag ‘er up! Gather up the sides of the tin foil and carefully wrap the artichoke like you’re giving it for Ghetto Christmas Party White Elephant.

Now do the same with the other ‘chokes you got ready to go. Once you’ve wrapped wrapping (yeah, I know, I’m clever like that!), throw them on the barbe (grill) for, like, 17-19 minutes. (Or in the oven for 1 hour 15 min.) You may want to check them around minute 15 just to make sure they’ve browned well and that the meat part is nice and tender.

They’ll be done once they’ve browned a bit, and the fleshy part of the “petal” is nice and soft, coming off easily with the slightest pressure from your teeth.

VOILA! Easy summer recipe of Seasoned Grilled Artichokes is bangin’ easy and easy to eat, too! USE THEM HANDS!

When you get to the heart, the thorny “cap” can pop right off, and you can cut the heart into pieces and dip it in butter and drizzle lemon juice all over it, and it’s DELICIOUS. You’ll know what I’m talking about once you get to this part. I didn’t take a photo–I was too busy stuffing my face.

You can eat these alone (as we did), or you can make a great lemon garlic aioli dipping sauce. But since my husband is vegan, we just ate it as is, and it was finger licking good.

If you make this delicious, easy summer food, make sure to link back to this thereafterish. food porn recipe with my name (Mae Lu–in case you didn’t know), and send me or link me to pictures, because I LOVE looking at FOOD PORN!

Bon apetite!

Here are the rest of my food porn posts! Don’t for get to like on FB, Stumble or Digg this (links below) if you loved this post!

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