Snow Peas: Update Series-Vol1

What better way to begin my harvest tale than with this picture of a little bearded man I found in the garden?


Early spring makes me crave the freshness and sweet crisp wonderful rewardingly-fast-growing awesomeness of peas. So I always plant waaay too much. I had two 6ish-foot rows of peas this year. Mostly snow and sugar snap with a few shelling peas for fun (Basil really likes the process of picking, shelling and eating while we're hangin out in yard.) So we ate all the peas we could handle. I made pea dishes for every picnic and party I went to, I gave them away by the bag to every willing friend that came for a visit. And still, a few weeks back I had way more peas than I knew what to do with starting to go to seed on the vine. Something had to be done.

I got out the old wire basket that I somehow came to posses, got out my enormous stock pot and got harvesting! I'll be really happy to have those peas in the freezer when it gets all lame and cold again and I start to yearn for spring.

Side note: If you have never grown peas you really must. They are easy, quick and delicious. They germinate fine in cold temperatures, so early spring just poke your seeds in the ground and wait for the magic. The very best part though, is how sweet they are right off the vine; its like candy. To illustrate this point, I had picked a few handfuls, ended up using only half and put the rest in my fridge, where I forgot about them for a few days. When I noticed them and ate one, it lost so much sweetness I decided to scrap putting it in the salad and save it for dinner where the flavor
green wasn't so important, I almost just gave them to the ducks it was so disappointing! Grow peas! Sugar snaps are my favorite- you can eat them young like snows, let them get really big and shell them if you feel like it, but the whole thing is just so crunchy and amazing its unreal.

Okay, enough pea love, back to the harvest! How can we pick food in America without cheap labor? I found some down on the corner that was cute, and would work for peas, and didn't even eat much; it was an excellent deal. Here are a the boys at work:


And here we have the rows I put them to work on: the row in the foreground is mostly sugar snaps, with half of the side closest to the camera Garden Peas (i.e. shelling peas or English Peas). The far row was all snow peas, a few days earlier I had picked half a row and given them to a friend. I still ended up with almost a half gallon after they were cut, cleaned, processed frozen and vacuum packed. Man!
And here, here is an awesome tower of snow peas.:
I sorted them by size so I could keep all the small ones whole while cutting up the larger ones.
Ready for blanching!This is the funnest part, after the prep, the blanching, the cold water to arrest the cooking, you get to eat a few as you dry them before they go in the freezer. So good!
Evidence: he kept on sneaking them before I got them in the bag!