Turn Pasta Into A Creamy Comfort Meal With This Canned Vegetable

Lots of go-to comfort dishes start with just one or two ingredients, like this combination of white beans and Parmesan. The warming hug that is a bowl of pasta is likewise at the core of many of our favorites, and we've gussied that up with a can of cheesy broccoli soup as a sneaky sauce when time hasn't been our friend. But there's another tasty canned ingredient that elevates the staple carb to new heights in mere moments: artichoke hearts. These pale green, soft-as-butter veggies are pre-cooked, so they will blitz to a smooth purée in seconds and can be combined with either cream or cottage cheese, a dash of olive oil, parmesan, and seasoning to make a soothing sauce for any type of pasta.

Artichoke hearts have an earthy taste, often described as a halfway house between asparagus and celery, though the liquid they're stored in can impact that flavor profile. Most canned or jarred artichokes are preserved in either oil or vinegar, and it's the latter's strong taste that can put some people off. If you can't get hold of artichoke hearts in oil, then carefully rinse off as much of the vinegar as you can from 'chokes to dial down that sharpness. As well as making a yummy pasta sauce, artichokes are a great side dish straight out of the tin, can be added to a soup or stew, and make a tasty, year-round dip.

Adding a can of flavorful artichoke hearts to your meals not only adds more flavor but can also boost your intake of dietary fiber, potassium, and vitamin C, among other nutrients (via Healthline). Eaten in moderation, canned artichoke hearts can also be a good low FODMAP food to try for people with IBS. Despite all those benefits, we think artichokes get an unnecessarily bad rap. They can be confused with Jerusalem artichokes (which look like small, knobbly, reddish potatoes), but artichoke hearts are actually members of the thistle family and lie nestled within a dense globe of thick, dark leaves.

Those leaves are the main reason many home cooks give fresh artichokes a wide berth — there's a lot of peeling and trimming to be done for not much actual edible vegetable. Happily, we can buy oodles of jarred, canned, and even frozen artichoke hearts that are ready to eat, which is good news for anyone who's a fan of this versatile veggie. Yet across social media, opinions about them vary. There are those who think they're horrible (of course), but dividing lines also exist between people who prefer fresh over jarred and jarred over canned. We say give them all a whirl and see which you like the most.