Y'all, I had a revelation and a gardening success tonight, all at the same time.
So, I've been growing garden peas this year. I've grown sugar snaps before, but not for years and never a basic garden pea. I had visions of fancy pea puree and whatnot, but I probably won't have a big enough crop for that, so I decided to pick some tonight and just cook them with dinner. (Dinner, by the way, contained three things and two of them came from my patio garden. I'm a little proud. Imagine if I had more than just a patio!) Anyway. This whole time I've been wondering why I've never actually seen fresh peas in the produce section - sugar snaps, snow peas, but not garden peas, except for bags of frozen peas. I can now say that it take a lot of pea pods to produce a dish...and the shelling is a process. Although it was my first time doing this, so I guess I probably don't know the most efficient way to do it. I'll say this, though: it was WORTH it.
I picked probably 2 dozen pods and shelled them, leaving me with about half a cup of peas. These peas, for the record, bore NO resemblance to the frozen peas I've always eaten. I generally support frozen vegetables - healthier than canned, and they fill the gap between fresh seasons. But this was a totally different vegetable! I've
told you about my weird allergies before, and they meant I couldn't snack on them raw, but I wanted to get as close as I could, so I blanched them. I brought a small sauce pan of water to boiling, tossed them in with some sea salt, and 30 seconds later drained them and dished them with a tiny bit of butter. They were SO GOOD. They still had a pop, a crunch, like fresh peas, and a juiciness to them. I hope the plant produces many more...maybe I'll even stop long enough to get pictures of the next round!
