UnRecipe: Three Easy Peasies

The oddball summer we enjoyed/griped about has at least given us one good thing at Casa de Wasabi -- a bumper crop of snow and sugar snap peas. I did a post a little while back about using the greens when I was thinning some of the rows, but for the last couple of months, we've been eating our veggies and then some.

Eat your greens -- we've got a garden full of 'em! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

There's been some weeks where I've been able to collect several pounds' worth of peas. It's more than I know what to do with them, but luckily they last for a while in the fridge before Wilty and Slimy take over. They make for great snacks, dipped in hummus, and when sliced into matchsticks, I like to sprinkle a handful over salads for a nice, fresh crunch. My favorite way to use them is tossing into a stir fry. I know that's kind of a de facto move, but I really do like tossing together whatever vegetables I have on-hand into a hot wok and making an ad hoc spicy finishing sauce. It's fast, but it's also very comforting to me. Especially when along with the peas from our garden, we still get our big ol' box of mystery veggies from our CSA delivery. How's that for roughage?

Mind your Peas and Qs - Photos by Wasabi Prime

When I cook with the peas, I prefer the flat snowpeas, saving the sweeter sugar peas for snacking. Not to be Captain Obvious, but if you've never really noticed the difference between sugar and snow peas, just take a gander above to see how the shorter, more rounded sugar snap peas differ from the flat, wide snow peas. You'll notice the flavor as the season moves along and the sugar snaps have a heightened sweetness. They're one of the easier things to grow in a garden, especially for lazy gardeners like myself -- once you have the pea plants going and preferably climbing upwards on some sort of trellis (I'm super lazy, and just had them scrambling up stakes), they'll flower with these delicate white blooms and before you know it, the plants will be awash with peas. They grow quickly and you'll be surprised how fast your crisper drawer will fill with peas. It'll go from a handful here and there to bagfuls of a pound or two a week, depending on how many plants you've got. I've seen people puree the peas to make a smooth hummus-type dip, but I really like them whole and crunchy. If you throw them into a stir fry as the last ingredient, they'll keep their crispness.

Several dinners, thanks to the backyard produce supply - Photos by Wasabi Prime

As I blah-blah-blah about how great they are in a stir fry, you're probably wondering, what kind of sauce are you making for these mystical magical stir frys, Wasabi? I've mixed things up -- I like using jarred tamarind paste and making a sour, savory Pad Thai-like sauce, mixing a bunch of vegetables with scrambled egg and finishing with crushed peanuts. I also enjoy using black bean paste -- really rich, deep flavor, and you don't need to use a lot of it to mix up a fast sauce that holds up nicely with sliced beef and green onions to go with the peas. The latest bag of peas went into a vegetarian stir fry with a ton of cremini  mushrooms, tofu and chili sauce; kind of a Szechwan inspired stir fry that tasted extra good on one of the oddball rainy, cool days we had in between the heat spells. I'd recommend getting tamarind or black bean paste from your local Asian market -- you can usually find these in the sauces/flavorings aisle. These are ingredients that are probably added into other sauces you've had before, but it's nice to have them at your disposal, and not already mixed into a pre-bottled sauce, as you can control the flavors. I would say you could control the salt, but these are packed full of sodium, so just keep an eye on the labels and you can water them down as needed. I use sodium/sugar-free rice wine vinegar to loosen a sauce as well as add a tart, sharp flavor. Use a corn starch slurry to thicken, since ingredients like fresh vegetables and tofu can give off quite a bit of liquid.

Mushrooms, tofu, bok choy and peas, perfect for Meatless Mondays - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Appreciating the Green Pea-ness of Gardening

You know I just wanted an excuse to use that stupid joke about "green pea-ness." Say  it out loud in a large, crowded room of your work peers and HR representatives, that you appreciate the flavor of green pea-ness. I dare you. This is why I should never be let back into Corporate America, people.

Pea vines invading my mapo tofu - Photo by Wasabi Prime

Of course, this has nothing to do with anatomical discussions, more a moment to further ruminate on one of the nice things of living out in BFE-ville and having the benefit of a sizeable yard. I literally let two whole packets of sugar snap and snow pea seeds germinate, sprout into a Medusa-like tangle of roots between wet paper towels, and then meticulously plant every one of 'em into our vegetable garden beds. Ergo, we have a mofo-plethora of pea plants. Initially, it was nice to thin the rows, pulling the more tender shoots to eat in salads and make dishes more whimsical with the thread-like corkscrew fronds from the creeping vines. When the plants get big, you fall behind on the row-thinning, it's more like Day of the Triffids, and you're just hacking back what you can, just in the hopes the garden bed doesn't choke itself out from overplanting. This leads to the latest batch of hastily unplanned UnRecipes... 

Not just for delicate restaurant plating -- pea vines used as hearty greens - Photos by Wasabi Prime

Much like the logic behind CSA-cooking, aka, Weekly Iron Chef Madness -- all roads lead to stir-fry. Once washing and (hopefully) de-bugging all the overgrown pea vines, they can be chopped up and cooked down like any hearty green. When it's fresh and raw, you pick up the distinct sweetness of peas, but as the vines get thicker, they're not as tender, the leaves can be used for salads, but the vines themselves get a little tough. They can still be cooked down the way you would a bunch of chard or spinach, but I tend to strip the leaves and cook the chopped stems first, to give them a head-start before the leaves are added to wilt down as a finish.

I always have good intentions towards the weekly Meatless Monday challenge, to incorporate one day of sustainable animal-free meals during the week. Emphasis on "intention," as somehow a little bit of meat always works its way into my day, but at least once in a while, I'll get away with making a meatless dish and Mr. Wasabi won't even notice. Or at least he doesn't put up a huge fuss about it, bless his heart. I was able to make a savory and creamy peanut coconut milk curry, mixed with tofu, chickpeas and basically whatever I had in the pantry, but also included pea vines. These were the larger, more mature vines, so they were chopped small and cooked down so you didn't have to gnaw on them for too long. I did something similar with one of my quick-cook staples, mapo tofu. If I have extra vegetables, they're always easy to incorporate in the spicy, salty, sour mix of tofu and ground meat. I threw in some rough-chopped pea vines into the last batch of mapo tofu and they wilted down and mixed in with the other ingredients perfectly.

None of these dishes are particularly glamorous or fancy, it's more a way to cook with whatever's on-hand and improvise when needed. I was glad to say that once pea vines grow out of their restaurant-darling tender delicacy phase, they're still a player in the kitchen, if you don't mind making some simple, hearty fare. And if you get it from your own backyard, it saves you a trip to pick up something at the store or farmer's market.

Mixed Plate: July Gardenwatch

It's been over a month since I last posted about Le Jardin de Wasabi and I'm glad to say I'm able to gather more than a few handfuls of herbs. I can gather a handful of sugar peas, along with those herbs now! Woo hoo!!

Behold, my Green Pea-ness - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I've been regularly visiting the little forest of sugar snap pea plants, nabbing handfuls of green pea-ness (yes, say that out loud, in a crowded room, I dare you!), as well as snipping herbs, mostly to keep the plants from going totally out of control. I'm fairly certain the lemon balm and mint plants I have are plotting towards world domination, so I make sure to keep them on opposite sides of the yard and I harvest literal handfuls every week to keep their global anarchy at bay. But the sugar peas are kindly and amiable, as they continue to provide just enough to keep me supplied in weekly stir frys and salads. I tend to pick them when they're small, mostly because I like them tender, and it keeps them from sitting too long and becoming tempting targets for bugs. Cracking open a sugar pea and finding a big fat caterpillar in it is not a good way to get a meal going.

At the risk of personal health and provoking the ire of trained foragers, I've been gathering little red berries on this random bush that grows out of a dead stump in our yard. They're really tiny berries, super tart and it probably takes me over a week or two of steady picking to yield maybe a small jar's worth of jam. Mr. Wasabi calls them bilberries, I've heard them called currants, and when I look online I only find articles that heavily advise me to keep poison control on speed dial. But so far, we're not hallucinating or seeing spirit horses galloping in the sky, so I think we're good on our backyard foraging. With the exception of Miss Indy eating some "magic" mushrooms that grew in our marshy lawn and completely tripping-out, we've been very fortunate in nature's bounty.

Mystery Berries - delcious and non-hallucinogenic! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

But on to safer harvests -- I have to say our garden will most likely not yield any impressive veggie harvests due to our funky summer weather and regular raids by woodland creatures. I'm constantly sowing carrots because the ones that start growing just get eaten up, which has not happened in previous years, so clearly we have a new fuzzy neighbor that is most unwelcome. The chard I had growing got om-nommed by leaf miners, so I'm cutting bait and pulling the rows to put in something else. I still have seeds left and will likely replant for the fall, but in containers on the patio that are tougher for the bugs to get to. I've been a fan of onions and garlic as creatures great and small seem to steer clear of them -- I have scallions, shallots and have been planting our garlic that sprouts. I snip the greens from all those, which are great in soups, stir frys and a flavorful garnish, since the parsley I've planted is too young to snip. I've been trying to grow everything from seed, so it's slow going for some items, but I did pick up some basil plants at the farmers market -- had to transplant a couple of them into different pots, as two were nearly mutilated beyond recognition by slugs. Boo!!!

Herbal remedies from Jardin de Wasabi - note the wily mint and lemon balm! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

But as I've said before, hope springs eternal and gardening is the realm for optimism. I've got eggplant sprouts getting big and strong in the laundry room, set for an outdoor move, along with Walla Walla onion and broccoli rabe sprouts that are sprouting both indoors and out. The photos of the peat pots on this post are a little old, as the sprouts are probably over two inches high and at the risk of a serious jinx, I have to say, so far, so good. I moved several summer squash sprouts outdoors and nearly half of the sprouts got wiped out from insects, but there's seven or eight troopers that seem to be holding the line. I salute their Red Dawn surivorship and hope they get big, strong and squashy.

So wish the garden good luck and I look forward to posting regular updates as well as kitchen experiments with some of the harvested goods!

Keeping fingers crossed for the new kids on the gardening block! - Photos by Wasabi Prime