It’s only fitting that my Jewish boyfriend Daryl introduced me to the artichoke. Even though I was part-Sicilian, I had somehow never eaten one. I saw little culinary potential in the daunting, thorny bulb. Turns out, my Sicilian forebears also had to be convinced by their Jewish friends and neighbors that the artichoke offered much more than met the eye.
 
Daryl also introduced me to another thing I would grow to love and adopt as my own: Judaism. Becoming a Jew by choice motivated me to connect to Jewish culture and history, and to do that, I started exploring Jewish food.