It's not easy being green

Or Khaki.  That’s what color the peas were that my mother served us as kids.  Right out of the can, heated in their own liquid.  Serious Ick Factor.  Then spooned onto your plate just when you thought dinner was going to be alright.  You weren’t allowed to leave the table until you ate your peas.  Mushy to boot.

Having delayed their consumption until the bitter end, they were now cold as well.  My first attempt would be to bury them in a spoonful of mashed potatoes and swallow them whole, but that rarely worked.   I would end up just trying to figure out how to hide them in my napkin, the potatoes, my shirt sleeve, even in my mouth until I could get outside or into the bathroom and spit them out.

Flash forward:  I’m standing at the Farmers Market in CA, paying $7 for a basket of fresh shelled peas.

Flash forward again:  I’m making chicken pot pie for Grace The Girl, having only met her a few weeks prior where I saw her demolish a chicken pot pie at The Gris.

“It’s her favorite.”  (Not anymore, but that’s another post.)

My mom made the best chicken pot pie.  She was a pie-maker and made the best crust on the planet.  The ingredients were simple:  chicken, chicken stock slightly thickened, peas and carrots.  I could have lived without the peas, but for this dish we were allowed to pick around them.   Having finally discovered frozen peas, this might not have been necessary, but our taste buds were too tainted to try them.

I’m spooning the filling into the pie shell when I realize I have put nearly an entire box of frozen peas into a 9 inch pie.  The last thing I wanted was to have this seven old think dinner at my house was punishment, so I painstakingly spooned the filling back into the bowl, and picked more than half the peas out of it.

Chris:  “They’re her favorite.” 

Of course they are. 

As this Winter came and went, and Easter flew by us dieters and non-imbibers,  dinner at our household was rarely photographed.  Grace and I did decorate, and just as we were about to change over to the Summer Mantle, we got inspired and made an Italian Spring Classic:  Pasta Primavera.  The perfect dish to use up the last bit of Eastern Ham, and the newly shelled peas.

 

This is Grace, enjoying the fruits of her labor, but she likes hers with bacon instead of ham.