Eat Your Peas

On occasion a small child might have to be admonished to eat their peas.  If I had to hazard a guess that would be because the peas on the plate before them are bland, mushy, gray canned peas.  Blech!  I would have to be really starving to eat canned peas or otherwise coerced or bribed to eat them.  In any event my peas are delicious.  And that would be because they are organically-grown, free-range, hand-picked, flash-frozen English peas.  Directions as follows:

Pick your pea pods and situate yourself on the porch with the dogs and a frosty adult beverage.  The girls knew immediately what was up as they've been through this drill before.  They remember that shucking peas always results in the random escapee not making it to the bowl - instead finding its way to the porch floor and rolling across the deck.

BF Skinner and the other behavioral psychologists had an explanation for this - namely Operant Conditioning.  The shaping of behavior by means of random reinforcement.  Random punishment works too but that would entail the use of canned peas.  But I digress.

After shucking your peas dispose of the pods in the compost bin and set a pot of water on the stove to boil.  Add no more than one and a half cups of fresh peas to the boil for no more than 90 minutes seconds.  Fish them out with a sieve and transfer to a sink of cold tap water.  This process of blanching (scalding) stops the action of enzymes thereby preserving the color, freshness, vitamins and flavor of your vegetables.  The key is NOT to over-scald and chill immediately.  You can cook your peas down the road when thawed for meal prep.

 

Drain you peas in a colander and spread on cookie sheets covered with parchment paper and freeze solid. Freezing the peas allows you to transfer them to the packaging of your FoodSaver® vacuum sealer while retaining their shape when shrink-wrapped.  
Vacuum sealing prevents freezer burn.

Pro Tip - freeze in one cup packages for ease of meal planning. 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Vegetable goodness from garden to freezer within hours.  These peas will keep for years in their suspended animation of the freezer - although they're so yummy they won't last that long.

click on images to enlarge

As an aside when I transferred the peas to the chest freezer in the basement I noted that those remaining from last year and two errant packages from 2016 and 2015 were all processed on or about July 15th.

Predictable vegetable the English pea is...