Jim Davis: Hi! I'm Jim Davis for Harris Teeter. I'm going to show you now how to cut an artichoke down to the heart and get it prepared just to cook the heart.

Remember within artichoke, the stem is a continuation of the heart, so you don't want to cut this off, when you are preparing an artichoke heart. First we have to cut away about two-thirds of the top of the artichoke. Get rid of that.

Then we start peeling off the leaves just few, pull off some of the out, darker outer leaves. Do not be surprised if your hands turn black, when you're dealing with artichokes. Okay, so now what we want to do is we want to trim down the outside of our artichoke, just like that, this little fuzzy choke in here, we have to expose and pull that out. What we have to do is we have to cut till we get down to the fuzzy choke. This is the choke that you want to take out of the artichoke. Even artichoke is a thistle of flower bud and of a thistle. And we want to take all of that fuzz out of here, very difficult to eat and it never cooks up and never dissolves. So we want to get all of that out. Okay.

You see how quickly it's turning brown when I told you it start to -- see that how quickly it oxidizes. So we'll take that and get it off. Okay, then we continue to trim, until we have just the artichoke left over and, we'll start rubbing a little of lemon juice, to up keep it color. Then we're going to peel off this heavy part of this choke stem. Remember, this is all part of the heart. So this is all the good part of artichoke to eat. Just peel that down. You can use your paring knife to do this, I think it's easier to use it with the vegetable peeler. Okay, we get it down to where it's nice light green, there we go. Now we'll rub that with a little bit of lemon, on the top, there we go, just like that. We have finished up taking all of the choke out of the center, and there you have it. That's how you cut an artichoke heart.