English Peas are here

english peas, purchased at the Pearl Market on my way to work today

When I was five, we lived in a very small town on a quarter acre and my parents had a very large garden. It's my only childhood memory of gardening, unfortunately, since that was fairly quickly followed by divorce and duplex living in a larger city. But my mom grew peas - proper little round peas that grow inside of a pod. And we would pop open the pods and scoop out the peas into a bowl for cooking (many never made it that far, since they taste yummy enough to eat straight from the pod).

Somehow I completely lost this memory and it took me until last year to try english peas again.Shelling them by hand is a labor of love, considering most pods contain 4-6 little peas. But now that I have little almost-two-year-olds whose only beloved green vegetable are (frozen) peas, I had to buy them as soon as they showed up in the market (2 pints for $5 at Pearl Market).

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them yet, I'll post again once I figure that out. But knowing that this is a very fleeting moment (seems like last year english peas were only in the market for a couple of weeks), I'm already thinking of how to preserve them to hang onto this moment a bit longer. Thankfully Google, and a blogger named Shaw Girl, provide the answer. She put together a lovely and well documented post on exactly how you can save your english peas by freezing for use all year long. Really, it's better than anything I could do, so I present to you, Shaw Girl's "Preserving Summer's Bounty - English Peas." And, thanks to one of her commenters, I am now putting a vacuum sealer on my Amazon wish list. I hate freezer burn!