Our Spring Lunch

[sparrowgrass]

Ahh, rachel.

The world is mud-luscious here in Missouri, and I am sadly afraid there will be no peas this year. Peas must go into the ground early if they are to produce anything before the heat comes, and this year I have not been able to till the garden because it is way too wet.

Last year, we had a late and vicious frost that took the tops off the peas, and the bunnies finished them off. This year, I got some chicken wire to guard against marauding rabbits, but the weather is just not cooperating.

I did manage to till one row, so I put the cabbages/broccoli out, but everything else is still in weeds and stubble from last fall. The asparagus hasn't even poked any little tips up--usually I have had a taste or two by the first week of April.

Maybe I will have a spring dinner sometime next week.

[racheld]

Were the tendrils presented raw, straight from the plant, as salad/garnish? I've munched a strand or two on occasion, when their tender little selves clung too closely and were ripped inadvertently from the plant. Even the microscopic little filia were tender and green-tasting. And pea leaves---delicious.

Peas seem to be more tolerant of Indiana's foibles of weather---I remember well the admonition of a Hoosier friend when I asked her of planting times "up here." She pondered, "Well, about mid-MAAAAAY is safe."

And May anywhere else we've lived would have had the peas up, wound up, picked, eaten, the stringy, leggy vines uprooted to make way for other peas or even cucumbers, and the fresh green mouthfuls just a wistful memory.

But here---Nobody seems to have a seed in the ground---we're lucky to get lows of 40 before tax-time, and the four gallant little Early Girls in their small plastic pots are out soaking up what passed for sunshine today. They'll spend the night in the upstairs kitchen sink, as usual, til weather bids fair for planting.

Mud-luscious, we are, as well. Were George Clooney and company to remake Oh, Brother, we could supply a fresh crop of Soggy Bottom Boys, right from our own back yard. But the woody old grapevine across the garage seems to be enjoying this wet---it's pliable and beginning to green up. Or maybe moss over.

[onrushpam]

AWWWW.  Being thought of over rat cheese is just the loveliest thing!!!

The peas-on-the-porch thing was reminiscent of all our pea-shelling days.  We lived in one of those bubbles called a "house" down in mosquito country, and so were rarely outside in the shade for very long at a time.

I was talkin' about the spring green English peas... the few little green gems we could have at Easter time. Those we could shell on the porch.

We did our picking at peril, swatting and sweating through the "OFF" slick on our arms and legs, and then carried the bushels and bushels of fieldpeas and purplehulls indoors for the shelling. 

I don't remember field peas in Missouri... but, I did my fair share of swatting and swiping picking pole beans and bush beans and digging taters!

I've come to LOVE field peas of all sorts down here in Georgia. But, I buy 'em at the farmers market, where they hull 'em for me in a frabjous machine! I only wish I could tell them to load me up a bushel or two. I'd love to take the gorgeous whole pods home to my own screened porch, where I could sit under the spinning fan and hull them myself. Time and a bazillion greyhounds don't allow that! So, I just buy bushels of them already hulled and put them up in the freezer for the cool nights of what passes for winter down here.

Our new Costco opens next week... high on my list of items to buy will be a gallon o' pickles for making some of Rachel's "cheaters"!!!

Pam

[Kouign Aman]

Yes, fresh and crisp and green, as a rather substantial garnish. Lovely.

[ruthcooks]

Rachel, the way you describe "stewed " potatoes is the method my mother used for her "creamed potatoes" and other vegetables from our garden. Creamed potatoes were often paired with new green peas, tiny new carrot rounds with onions, and green beans by themselves. Cut-up sparagus was always cooked a little differently--in water with a splash of milk and a bit of butter added at the end--and served in individual sauce dishes, rather like a soup.

None of these dishes work well with grocery store produce, unfortunately, and I have no garden so will have to be satisfied with memories. Sigh.

[racheld]

We used the littlest of the Baby Reds, and left the skins on. And we have only the store-source for asparagus, potatoes, sweet potatoes, etc., and the results are always pretty fine.

The potatoes were just always called "stewed" when made that way, and whole friendships were made and lost on whether the black pepper went in early or late. It was a churchladies' joust, much like the Gulliver's Big and Little Endians.

Some held that early pepper made the sauce "muddy" and others said that the pepper just "made" the dish. And then there were the handfuls-of-cheese proponents, the one bull-yon cube renegades, as well as the onion-tops afficionados.

Now THOSE were the ones who could make a dish of potatoes---I've never eaten better vichyssoise than a few of those dishes of country-kitchen stewed potatoes, with fresh-from-the-ground potatoes, lots of chive-small onion tops, shredded into dainty rounds, sometimes home-churned butter and cream fresh skimmed from the pan-tops.

And "creamed" potatoes were the local vernacular for mashed potatoes, in which more of the cream-thicker-than-the-potatoes enriched and enfattened, along with butter and salt. These two humble dishes, all from what the cooks had in the pantry, are outstanding examples of make-do becoming magnificent.

Going into Mammaw's kitchen and lifting the lid on the big Wearever, to reveal a pepper-and-onion-topped pot of stewed potatoes---Sunday every day.