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...
 

The Garden Chronicles

From this morning..

Sweet peppers in the foreground

Tomatoes - left margin

English peas - left garden edge.  They're finished with the exception of a few stragglers

Beyond the tomatoes are carrots, spinach, Bibb, romaine and red leaf lettuces along with beets

Center - three staggered rows of Blue Lake beans                   click on image to enlarge  

Broccoli north of the beans

In the distance from left to right - pickling cucumbers, Stuttgarter onions, German butterball spuds, and Kakai pumpkins

Vive le jardin magnifique!

Wildflowers

From our Saturday morning walk I present the following....

Black-eyed Susan - Rudbeckia hirta

False Sunflower (Ox-Eye) - Heliopsis helianthoides

Blue Vervain - Verbena hastate

Purple Coneflower - Echinacea purpurea

click on images for a closer look

 

Compass Plant - Silphium lacinatum

Raising a toast to native plants and the pollinators and birds that they serve...

Diplomacy

Here is what we know: 

Putin's dictatorship government invaded and annexed Crimea. 

Putin’s dictatorial government invaded Ukraine and continues to interfere militarily. 

Putin’s armed forces shot down a civilian airliner full of innocent people. 

Putin’s security services poisoned people in the UK for speaking against Russia. 

And real live members of Russia's intelligence agencies hacked the campaign of an opposition candidate as well as state boards of elections and related election entities in an attempt to influence the outcome of a presidential election and to undermine the integrity of our 2016 elections. 

Just my humble opinion - if ever there was a moment for President Trump to harness his arsenal of denigration now is that time.  Trump’s willingness to let fly with brutal candor is one of the traits his supporters love best.  And the impolite thing that needs to be said as these two men prepare to meet at their summit is that Putin is not 'a strong leader.'  Putin is a KGB thug.  A Godless individual.  A stone-cold killer.  And the leader of a vast and failing criminal enterprise.  

Stay tuned…

A Warming Sensation

The last two devices were the older General Electric.  The machine before that was manufactured by Siemens - München, Germany.  And before that it was the same Siemens device.  The first was the General Electric.  They’re all equally loud yet hands-down the German tool has a few more inches of space and is better suited to a catnap during the forty-five minute procedure.  If you ask for headphones I recommend the Lyle Lovett mix on the Pandora channel.  It helps with the short snooze.  Along the way I learned that the warming sensation one feels is caused by agitation of protons in the body's cells due to the electromagnetic field. 

Magnetic resonance procedures have been utilized in clinical settings for more than three decades.   Increasing magnetic field strengths and more powerful radiofrequency coils have resulted in new safety issues for this technology.  One of the safety concerns is tissue heating.  Radiofrequency power and the electromagnetic field in magnetic resonance imaging can induce heat within a patient’s tissues due to resistive losses and the thermogenic qualities from the electromagnetic field.  During MR procedures, the majority of the RF power transmitted for imaging is transformed into heat within the patient’s tissue.  The body’s response to MR procedure related heating is variable and depends on many factors.  Medications, disease states affecting thermoregulatory control, weight, and age all play a role.  I would describe it as an odd warming sensation.  You can learn more about benefits, risks and the warming phenomenon here.

And as for image results - so far so good. 

Sunset

Whew!  

Almost missed this one tonight. 

Nice study of this end of the color spectrum.

Bracketed three different exposures to capture the transition.

'Twas a good one - must be something in the atmosphere....

Friday the 13th

The fear of Friday the 13th is also called friggatriskaidekaphobia or paraskevidekatriaphobia.  

Friggatriskaidekaphobia comes from Frigg, the Norse goddess of wisdom after whom Friday is named, and the Greek words triskaideka, meaning 13, and phobia, meaning fear.  Paraskevidekatriaphobia is also derived from Greek: paraskeví translates as Friday, and dekatria is another way of saying 13.  Experts have suggested that friggatriskaidekaphobia affects millions of people and estimate that businesses - especially airlines - suffer economic losses on Friday the 13th.    

Friskaidekaphobia, or the fear of the number 13, is even more widespread.  As a matter of fact many taller buildings, hotels, and hospitals skip the 13th floor and many airports do not have gates numbered 13.  In many parts of the world, having 13 people at the dinner table is considered bad luck.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously suffered from triskaidekaphobia.  He refused to travel on the 13th day of any month and would not host a dinner party with 13 guests.  

According to superstition, there are a number of things you can do to ward off ill fate.  Scientists suggest knocking on wood, crossing your fingers, avoiding black cats, not looking at the full moon through a pane of glass, and throwing salt over each shoulder. 

Me?  I’m going to give my dogs a belly rub. 

Cheers!