Thoughts on approaching this week’s box from subscriber Conne Ward Cameron.
Sugar snap peas. Yum. So sweet and crunchy they’re hard for me to resist right out of the box.
Let’s say just for argument’s sake that you wanted to store your peas away for another time. Maybe a week away? May be month away?
The story of the development of the sugar snap is at https://grassfedcow.com/
But there are times when you may want to save those sugar snaps for later. So don’t just bag them up and put them in the freezer. You’ll end up with thawed green-ish brown-ish mush. But if you blanch them before freezing, you can take them right from the freezer into a stir fry and they’ll still have their bright green color and a bit of crunch.
Blanching is a time-honored way to stop the deterioration of vegetables before they go into the freezer. Putting the vegetables quickly into boiling water, and then into an ice water bath, kills the enzymes that begin destroying fruits and vegetables as soon as they’re picked.
So say you wanted to freeze your sugar snap peas. First wash them and discard any ends that look a little wilted. Prepare a large bowl of ice water. Then bring a pot of water to a boil and drop in the peas. Cook them for just a minute, maybe a minute and a half. Then remove them from the hot water and put them into the ice water so they’ll cool down rapidly. As soon as they’re cool, spread them out on a dish towel to drain and dry, then freeze them in a single layer and when frozen, bag them up in whatever way you like.
If I’m not just eating them right from the box, I’ve been known to slice them diagonally and toss them in a salad with something like those Kirby cucumbers (my favorites) and a tomato, some sliced green onion from those sweet little Vidalia-type onion greens and add a simple oil and vinegar dressing. Good right away, good the next day for lunch.