So I availed myself of two semi-gourmet treats that my local, non-gourmet produce stand stocks every spring: cardoons and cranberry beans. I’m sure I’ll be cosmically punished for this attitude, but I can’t tell you what kind of smug satisfaction I get from buying things like this at Top Tomato, where everyone speaks Spanish and the eggplant piles are shoulder-high, while stressed foodies clutching their little recipes clipped from Gourmet are paying four times as much at whatever silly greengrocer-to-the-stars in Manhattan. (Same goes for popping down to the poultry place and getting the quail last weekend.)

First, the cardoons: I have tried to cook these damn things before and have never succeeded in getting rid of their pervasive, hideous bitterness that fills your mouth like a plague. Why the hell would I bother, then, you ask?

Cardoons are like giant stalks of celery except, get this, they’re related to and taste just like artichokes. I fucking love artichokes more than anything, so the hope of basically having two pounds of pure artichoke heart–in weird, albino, monster-celery form, at $2.49/lb.–is awesome. Cookbooks recommend parboiling cardoons, which I’ve done–but no matter how long I boil them, I still get that tongue-coating bitterness…plus the teeniest hint of that great tingling artichoke sensation, just to give me hope.

This time I was determined: I boiled the little buggers in three separate batches of water, each time with a big splash of salt and lemon juice. I need to do research on which, if either, of these things helps draw the bitterness out (food scientists, speak now)–but maybe it was just the fresh water that finally resulted in delightfully artichoke-flavored cardoons with nary a hint of bitterness. Success–except they’d had the bejesus so boiled out of them that they were almost mush. And I’m sure any nutritional value was long gone. Oh well–I tossed them in the lamb shoulder I had braising.

To balance out the artichoke, I mean cardoon mush, I shelled the cranberry beans–so pretty and splotched pink, like old chintz–and parboiled them till they were just barely soft, then tossed them into the lamb pot. At least something in the stew would call for putting in your dentures.

But the best part about the cranberry beans is that when I threw them in the boiling water, they started to _sing_. I swear, they chirped like little birds. I had a weird poultry store flashback for a second. I made Peter come over and listen, just to be sure I wasn’t having a dream about plunging live quail into a pot. But what was really happening (I’m guessing) was that the moisture inside the beans was expanding into steam and squeezing out through the cracks in the skin…and making this absolutely adorable twittering noise. If those beans hadn’t been in boiling water, I would’ve pet them.

Then it came down to the one semi-gourmet thing you _can’t_ get in glamorous Astoria, and that’s good bread. Italians and Greeks just don’t go in for that nice chewy business. It’s all fluff for them. So Peter had risen to the challenge–and, rather anticlimactically, met it in just two attempts. Here I was looking forward to at least several weeks of various sorts of bread, and long obsessive conversations about the myriad factors at work…and then he just nailed it on the second try. Damn.

It was great bread–chewy crust, chewy inside, faintly sour. Perfect for dipping in the lamb stew sauce. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was watching that horrible “High School Reunion 2” on TV, I would’ve felt truly gore-may.