Peas, Peas, and more Peas: Preserving the Harvest
Welcome back to another boozie gardening season! If you are like me, sometime around January or February the itch to get back in the garden is getting maddening. So, like me, you may turn to starting your seeds indoors, hopefully unlike me you didn’t overdo it and plant twelve of every variety of plants you can start indoors. Needless to say friends, family members, and colleagues were all provided with the plants to start their gardens. More on indoor seed starting to come. Regardless, by the time March rolls around I am lured into the garden for fresh air and cool weather seed starting. A perfect cool weather plant to start with, peas.
I planted three varieties of peas this season; snow peas, sugar snaps, and shelling peas. Snow peas give you the benefit of an early harvest, good for two reasons, you really get the satisfaction of home grown veggies early in the season and you get a staggered harvest. After the snow peas were eaten up the shelling and sugar snap peas were nearing maturity. I had a HUGE crop of sugar snaps and shelling peas. And these two had to be harvested around the same time and thus lead me to today’s blog post, preserving your harvest for the future. Now you don’t have to eat every meal with a side of peas and get so tired of them that you never want to see another pea again!
I preserved these last two varieties in two different ways. For the shelling peas, I just removed them from their pods and saved some in the fridge to use in the next few meals. For rest I just laid them out on a sheet pan to dry. You can test to see if they are fully dried by hitting a pea with a hammer. If the pea shatters it is ready for long term storage. I saved some in a seed envelope which I labeled and dated to store for planting next year. The rest I put in an airtight container to use whenever dried peas are appropriate, such as in soups or stews. Don't worry if some of the pods look dried out already, just set those aside for the batch to be dried and stored. See the image on the left below, I used one bowl to save the fresh ready to use peas and one bowl for those that should be dried.
For sugar snaps however, you can eat the pods as well as the peas, in fact that is the most tasty and satisfying way to eat them. The crisp bite of the sugar snap is what makes these peas a gardeners favorite, you can pick them right off the vine and snack on them as you peruse your garden. In order to preserve the signature snap of this variety you can blanch and freeze them. In order to prepare your peas to be preserved, snap or cut the stem end of the pod and peel the string away from the pod, see the image on the right above. The string is not as pleasant to eat as the rest of the pod but wont hurt if you leave it on. The next step is to try to get your peas as close to a uniform size as possible. For me that meant cutting the larger pods in half and maybe just trimming the end of smaller pods. The purpose is just to get them close enough to the same size that they cook at the same rate. Then, bring water to a boil and add your peas, you may need to do this in batches. Make sure to have a bowl of ice water standing by. Boil your peas for 90 seconds and then as soon as possible get the peas out of the boiling water and into the ice water to stop the cooking process. After your peas have cooled, lay them out on a paper towel lined sheet pan to dry. Alternatively, if you have a salad spinner you can use it before laying them out to dry in order to speed up the process. Drying the peas helps to ensure that the peas don't stick together when frozen. Lastly, put your dried sugar snaps in a freezer safe container and you will have garden grown peas for future meals. Don’t forget to shell some and dry them out to plant next year.
Looking forward to the next harvest!
Comments