[Sca-cooks] Thistle Recipe from Fabulous Feasts

[kingstaste at mindspring.com]

I have made this, once with great success, and once without.

The object of the recipe is to get the rice stuffing for the artichoke a
nice purply color, so that it looks like a thistle in bloom when served.
The rice is flavored with chicken stock as I recall, and is supposed to be
savory.  We did this (many, many years ago) in the test kitchen and it
turned out great.  We loved it.  The blueberries are just there for color
and don't add much flavor, so it didn't taste like it should have been
sweet.
For the feast, things getting away from one as they do, we lost our tiny
little minds and used the blueberries, and then thought "What's wrong with
this?  It doesn't taste right - add some sugar!"  so we screwed it up and
made it sweetened after all.  We went ahead and used it as the stuffing,
most folks put the glob of sweetened blueberry rice to one side and just ate
the artichoke (after I went out into the hall and gave everyone a lesson in
the proper way to eat an artichoke - we also had melted butter on the
tables).
So, as a subtlety, it has some merit, as long as you don't get stupid
half-way through it.
Yes, feast failures one still hears about, decades later...
Sigh..
Christianna