This time around, we adorned our pizza with marinated artichoke hearts that I made all by myself! I was really proud of them and they turned out to be delicious! They were also simple to pull together and, in the same sitting I whipped up an apero involving homemade aioli (using pretty much the same ingredients I used for the hearts).

Canned artichoke hearts are super expensive in the supermarché, but artichokes can be a bit intimidating for week night dinner fare because they take so long to cook. Still, I couldn't turn down biocoop's offer of two artichokes for 89 cents, I bought first and thought later.

Luckily, I had time in the morning to steam the artichokes and let them cool before de-leafing them and getting to their hearts. I tucked the leaves away in the fridge, where they could later be retireved and offered as an apéro (French for appeteazer).

I put the halved hearts in an old yogurt jar and poured my home-made marinade (home-made-nade?) over them. The marinade was easy; I really slowly heated up a good deal of olive oil, in which I let soem roughly chopped garlic cloves, fresh parsley, lemon juice, and salt simmer. I let the oily blend cool before pouring it over my steamed artichoke hearts.

Keep the salt, garlic, oil and the other half of lemon out, because this is when you can make aioli appeteazer sauce! I cracked one egg into my blender, threw in another head of garlic, added some salt and lemon juice and let it spin- slowly dripping about a half cup of oil into the whole thing until it started getting fluffy and a littel less yellow. I also cheated by adding a bit of crème fraîche. You can tell me if this is a weak way out, but I started to get iffy about how much oil I had just used for the entire condiment/topping part of my evening's meal and felt like offsetting it a bit. In any case, both hearts and aioli were well appreciated with a simple but yummy bottle of organic Côtes du Rhone.