Eat, Grow, Eat

The other day’s rainy day lunch was uniquely seasonal, but also inspired by the beginnings of a kitchen clean up (the appraiser for my mortgage refinance wants photos, and the kitchen is long overdue for some maintenance) and two different cooking shows I have watched for years - my decades of viewing PBS cooking shows and the Food Network pay dividends!
Produce-wise, one of the times of the year I most look forward to is sugar snap pea season.  With COVID-19 isolation this year and fewer trips to the market, I almost missed it, but snagged some weeks back when I saw them, eagerly anticipating having their crunchy goodness with the “magic sauce” that Molly Yeh uses on her green beans - it IS liquid gold!
Alas, it’s been a really demanding few weeks in the virtual office, and the sugar snap peas languished and they started to get slimy.  I abhor food waste, especially in these times of pandemic food insecurity.  So I had already gone through and picked out the best of the peas for an earlier lunch - just raw sugar snap peas with magic sauce - tossing out a few icky ones for compost as I came across them.  But the dreaded task of going through the rest was the other day’s mission - far fewer good candidates, much slimier, so only the dregs were left.  Then I remembered there are actual peas inside the shells; sure, the attraction of sugar snap peas is eating the shells too, but not a necessity.  There were far many more salvageable peas than shells.  Some shells were practically disintegrating but the peas within still protected and firm.  The process revealed some peas so far along in a disintegrating shell that they were starting to sprout...

...But without most of the shells, not enough heft for lunch...
Serendipitously, that day’s episode of ”Jazzy Vegetarian” had a soba noodle with peanut sauce recipe featured. Aha! Cross pollination of cooking shows and fridge clean and pantry raid yielded soba noodles with sugar snap peas and salvaged celery, also on the cusp and too long in the fridge, all dressed in magic sauce! Exactly what my rumbling belly needed!
And then, inspired by some of gardeners I follow who are already planning their Fall gardens, and after consulting Fall planting calendars and finding peas on them for 7b, it occurred to me that maybe I could try for sugar snap peas as soon as this Fall... so, armed with the sprouting peas, the sugar snap babies are getting a shot.  The tomato plants that never thrived, and so never got to leave their seed cells, got evicted from the pot that was earmarked for them, and in went the eight sprouting sugar snap peas. If they take, they can climb up the tomato cage that were earmarked for the tomatoes.

While out there planting, I also caught sight of some red amaranth broken by the heavy rains. So those got harvested, and were a nice addition chopped raw and wilted by the heat of a fast polenta, over which was poured “beefless beef tips” quickly heated in the microwave with baby carrots. A satisfying dinner at the end of a day of stretching store bought and Jardin-grown veggies.

Small accomplishments.