Harmony Valley Farm: July 7, 2022 - This Week's Box Contents Featuring Sugar Snap and Snow Peas

This week’s box is filled with some exceptional produce, both in flavor and appearance! The beets are sweet, the peas are snappy, the cauliflower is some of the nicest we’ve seen in early summer for several years, and the carrots are sunshine in the form of a vegetable! It’s hard to know just where to start when you have so many gorgeous and delicious vegetables to choose from! Let’s kick off this week’s Cooking With the Box with Peas, this week’s featured vegetable! I had a hard time selecting recipes as peas are one of my favorite vegetables and everything looked and sounded good! I settled on one feature recipe to include in our newsletter but included links to eleven more. Hopefully you’ll be able to find some inspiration in this list! As for the recipe of the week, I selected this recipe for Chicken, Cabbage & Snow Pea Grain Bowl with Coconut-Peanut Sauce (See Below). The version below is my slightly adapted version of a recipe I found at www.finecooking.com. It was originally published in the book Build-a-Bowl by Nicki Sizemore. This is the first time I’ve heard of this book, but I think I need to check it out. I love grain bowls like this because they are an easy way to put a meal on the table quickly, they are easy to take with you for picnic lunches and travel food or just a lunch to eat at work. All of the components can be prepped in advance so all you have to do is take a few minutes to assemble the bowl and you’re ready to go!

Life-Changing Baked Fish Tacos

In addition to the list of recipes to utilize peas, I pulled up a few recipes from past newsletters that received positive feedback. If you still have some lacinato kale from last week, pair it with this week’s beets to make this very tasty Roasted Beet & Kale Salad with Maple-Candied Nuts. You may also choose to use this week’s beets and beet greens to make Golden Beet Risotto with Crumbled Ricotta Salata and Sautéed Beet Greens. In addition to these two recipes, I have to mention a few recipes utilizing this week’s salad cabbage. The first is this light, refreshing Summer Vietnamese Rice Noodle Salad. This is a great salad to make for a light lunch or dinner on a hot day when you don’t want something heavy, and you don’t want to heat up the kitchen! This recipe for Life-Changing Crispy Baked Fish Tacos with Cilantro Lime Slaw is another keeper.

We hope to have more peas next week, along with the first of the green beans! Richard and Rafael keep digging our early, red-skinned potatoes and there’s a chance we may pull the trigger on harvesting some next week. There’s nothing better than new potatoes, steamed green beans and a creamy cucumber salad. These are just a few of the up-and-coming vegetables you have to look forward to. Of course, corn and tomatoes are not too far off, and I have to say the tomato field looks quite nice right now! Have an awesome week of cooking and I’ll see you back next week for more summer cooking! ---Chef Andrea

Vegetable Feature: Sugar Snap & Snow Peas

by Andrea Yoder

Our 2022 Trellised Pea Trials

Peas can be a challenge to grow for a variety of reasons, but this year has been quite a good year for both Sugar Snap and Snow Peas! Given the abundance of peas we’re picking this week, we thought it fitting to bring them to the forefront as the featured vegetable of the week. Both Sugar Snap and Snow Peas are classes of peas with edible pods. Snow peas have flat pods and produce small peas that will create bumps in the pods but will never fully fill out the pod. Sugar Snap peas are a cross between Snow Peas and English peas. English peas do not have an edible pod, but they produce plump peas that fill out the pod. They are quite tasty, but they are also quite a lot of work to shell! Sugar Snap peas boast the best of both worlds in that they have the edible pod of a snow pea but produce larger peas and are often sweeter than snow peas. Now, every year is different, and I think the snow peas we’re picking this year are some of the sweetest and best tasting we’ve grown in recent years!

Snow Peas

I’m not sure what got into Richard, but when we were ordering seeds last November, he decided to throw a curveball at me and Rafael. He took our planting plan that we had been following for many years and threw it out the window as he announced, “Let’s try trellised peas this year.” This was a new growing strategy for me and Rafael, but of course Richard had grown peas in this way in the past. In fact, we actually had some pea trellis stored in the barn and it was still in usable condition! Thus far we’ve been harvesting from plantings that we planted in our typical way. Sugar Ann is our preferred sugar snap pea that produces shorter plants that do not require trellising. The snow peas this week are Oregon Sugar Pod II, which is the snow pea we’ve planted for many years and also do not require trellising. Later this week or early next week, we’ll be picking some new varieties of snap peas that are produced on plants that are taller and require trellising to keep them off the ground. They are looking quite nice and I suspect the crew is going to enjoy picking them much better as they’ll be able to stand up to do so! We’ll see how these trials turn out and evaluate whether or not this is something we want to expand upon in future years.

The key to a good tasting Snow Pea or Sugar Snap pea is picking them at the right stage of maturity and keeping them cold. When peas come in from the field, we wash them in crates in a tank of cold water. We then put ice directly on them and put them in our cold cooler. The cold helps to stabilize the sugars and slow down the conversion to starches. We encourage you to keep them in the coldest part of your fridge and eat them within a few days for optimal sweetness and flavor.

Sugar Snap Peas

Both snow peas and sugar snap peas are pretty easy to prepare. The only prep they require is to remove the string that runs on the top of the pod. You can easily do this by pulling back the stem end which is attached to the string. Both varieties may be eaten either raw or cooked. In their raw form they make a wonderful snack but may also be incorporated into salads. If you choose to cook them, I recommend a quick, high-heat method such as stir-frying or sauteing. One word of caution when cooking peas, don’t overcook them! Their flavor and sweetness are best when they still have a touch of crispiness and crunch remaining in the pods. I often cook peas just to the point where they change color and turn bright green. This takes just a few minutes, so make sure you are attentive and plan accordingly!

Peas are not the most profitable crop we grow in terms of dollars, due to the high cost of labor to pick them. Every pea that is picked is picked by hand. No machine picking. Despite the low monetary return, they are amongst our top crops for making friends and that holds a high value for us! We’ve never had anyone lament on an end of year survey that there were “too many peas!” One of the challenges we often face is having enough crew time to pick them. Typically, pea picking coincides with strawberry picking and there are only so many hours in the work day and so many hands to do all the picking! This year we had a rather short strawberry season, which has worked out in your favor when it comes to peas as we’ve had more crew time available to pick larger quantities! So, friends, we hope you enjoy these peas we’ve grown for you this year. Whether you eat them right out of the bag or turn them into a tasty meal, take a moment to savor them and offer thanks to the hands that picked them for you.

Chicken, Cabbage & Snow Pea Grain Bowl with Coconut-Peanut Sauce

Yield: 4 servings

Photo from finecooking.com

Coconut-Peanut Sauce:

1 cup canned coconut milk

2 Tbsp lime juice

1 tsp tamari or soy sauce

1 tsp fish sauce

2 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped

2 tsp coarsely chopped fresh ginger

½ cup peanut butter

1 Tbsp packed light brown sugar

1 to 2 tsp sriracha

Salt & freshly ground black pepper, to taste

For the Bowls:

1 ½ cups snow peas

1 heaping cup thinly sliced salad cabbage (Sweetheart or Tiara)

¾ cup shredded carrots

Juice of ½ lime

1 tsp extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

2-3 cups cooked grains, such as quinoa, brown rice, or farro

2 cups chopped or cubed cooked chicken or tofu

For the Toppings:

Chopped fresh cilantro

Chopped fresh mint

Chopped roasted peanuts

Sriracha

Lime wedges

Make the sauce:

Place the coconut milk, lime juice, tamari, fish sauce, garlic, ginger, peanut butter, sugar and 1 tsp of the sriracha in a blender. Season with salt and black pepper. Blend on high speed until smooth. Taste and season with additional sriracha, salt, black pepper, and/or lime juice, as needed.

Build the Bowls:

Fill a saucepan with about 1 inch of water and bring to a simmer. Insert a steamer basket and add the snow peas. Cover and steam until bright green and tender crisp, about 2 minutes. Drain and rinse under cold water to stop the cooking. Pat dry.
Toss the cabbage and carrots with the lime juice and oil in a large bowl. Season with salt and black pepper to taste.
Spoon the grain into bowls. Arrange the snow peas, cabbage slaw, and chicken over the top. Drizzle with the coconut-peanut sauce and sprinkle with the cilantro, mint, and peanuts. Serve with sriracha, lime wedges, and additional sauce for drizzling.

This recipe was featured at www.finecooking.com, however it was excerpted from Build-a-Bowl by Nicki Sizemore. The original recipe called for red bell peppers instead of carrots and napa cabbage. Aside from these two minor seasonal vegetable changes, the recipe is as Nicki originally wrote it.

1 comment:

Lisa said...: We’re loving the peas! Thank you, thank you, thank you!; July 6, 2022 at 7:26 PM