WHEN it comes to selecting foods to please your palate, some things are just too obvious for words, and some are a little more off-field.

Things that I would put straight into the pleasing categories are simple classics such as a plate of chips. You don't need to see them, smell them, or even taste them to know that they will be good. With the exception of the portion of chips that I once bought from a backstreet kebab shop in Le Havre many years ago. His cooking oil, which was recycled olive oil cut with castrol GTX, could only have been just past tepid when he briefly soaked the potatoes in it. But this only goes to prove how many good chips I must have had over the years to remember the bad one.

Some foods take a little more imagination to get yourself to the point of being ready to enjoy their delights. A couple of friends deciding to punish themselves with a holiday with Trev & Sue prompted me to go a little bit crazy down at the local veg market at the weekend. In fact double crazy, because I went to the market at a neighbouring village on the Saturday rather than the usual one in our town on the Sunday. How wild am I? Throwing caution to the wind I dived in and bought a couple of artichokes, if that is not off-field I don't know what is: the things looked like they belonged back in a field, ready to be munched upon by Eeyore and his mates.

An act like this would be nothing to your average Frenchman, having been brought up on fresh food and things grown in dirt, but I come from a generation that was not only fed on butterscotch Instant Whip but actually enjoyed it. I do actually quite like my food to be packaged and not to make me feel too connected to nature, but in the spirit of experimentation I persevered.

The next step was a bit longer, it involved eating everything else in the fridge, including the plastic packaged part-baked baguette that was three weeks past its sell-by date, until there was nothing left but the dreaded arties. Breath was drawn, a pan full of boiling water was readied and the worldwide web was consulted to find out how to cook the disgusting-looking things. The hugely informative information superhighway told us to cook them for either eight minutes or 30, so I boiled them for 40 just in case. Luckily, our friend trained as a chef and despite not knowing one end of the artichoke from the other, was able to whisk up a delightful warm vinaigrette in no time at all. So we sat down to enjoy our spoils, and spoils is probably the right word - it practically spoilt our evening. You have to pull off each petal, dip it in the sauce and then basically wipe it over your front teeth to remove one micron of edible flesh before depositing the rest in the rubbish bowl on the table. Any meal involving a dustbin on the table has to be on a hiding to nowhere. And there are literally hundreds of these leaves on your way to the holy grail of the heart. But before you can get there you have to come face to face with the fact that you are eating nothing more than an overgrown thistle. The thing is furry in the middle, that can't be right.

The heart was okay, but was it really worth the journey? Our friend declared the artichoke to be the meal he would order on death row because it would surely postpone the sentence by at least a couple of days while you munched your way to the heart of thistledom. As for me, I'd have murdered for a plate of chips.