battle 8–day 3–peas

After the PB&J incident, I was determined to refocus my energies on sugar snap peas, except I was still being kind of a baby about driving in the floods (I mean, it’s not like it was just regular rain, people died, come on, I get to be a baby about driving in that, right?) and then, and then, I was reminded of this combination of joys by my favorite news source, the Associated Press: “Days of downpours and thunderstorms saturated the ground from Alabama through Georgia into eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, just months after an epic two-year drought in the region ended after winter rains.”

It’s not like I didn’t remember the drought, I did. And it’s not like I didn’t know we had just had days and days of rain, I did. But come on AP, did the drought have to be so epic? And was it absolutely necessary to point out in the same breath that the grounds are now saturated? Because this is what happens when rains saturate grounds after epic droughts in Georgia: trees fucking fall. I don’t mean branches break or the tops snap off; I mean whole motherfucking trees uproot and fall the fuck over.

And this displeases me. To an excessive degree.

So Tuesday when I began to imagine myself dodging falling pines and washing away in muddy flood-y bits, I decided, eh, maybe I’ll skip the extra driving and just make do with what I’ve got at home. I’ve got peas, Google and the will to live; I can definitely make dinner out of that.

At this point, I was no longer married to the sugar snap peas. I would eat whatever peas the Internet told me to. Plus, I wasn’t sure which ones the sugar snaps were. When I bought them at the farmer’s market I told myself, don’t forget, the sugar snaps look like this and snow peas look like this, but of course I forgot immediately. So Google and I sorted out which ones were which (snow peas are kind of flat and have tiny little peas in them, sugar snaps are fatter and look more like green beans to me), and then we talked about which of my peas would go best with what food I already had in the house. The amazing thing about this is that these days I actually do keep some food in the house…fresh food. And get this: David is out of town. David is out of town and I have food in the house and I’m feeding myself. I don’t know if the world has turned upside down or if I have a brain tumor, but the times, they are a changin’.

(No comment on the fact that I could have done this Monday night after I gave up on beige and pea casserole.) (OK, comment: I still don’t yet have the mindset of, it’s dinner time and this is what we have, let’s cook it, because I still can’t cook and I don’t have a full memory bank of vegetable items I can cook because I don’t like them. I mean, I like some now, but this is a slow process. I still need Google…and the will to live.) (Plus, I make a seriously good PB&J.)

The snow pea recipes all looked too complicated and required more ingredients than I had, and the frozen pea recipes were all too fancy for my mood, but the sugar snap pea recipes were Goldilocks right. Most interweb people, including my favorite people on Facebook, suggested dipping them in ranch and eating them raw, which I almost did, but then Google gave me a super easy looking pea and mushroom idea, and I figured in the spirit of the project—learning to cook and continuing to eat vegetables I’ve added to my diet—I might as well try that. Plus, I actually had mushrooms and I was just a little bit beside myself about that.

• 3/4 lb. sugar snap peas
• 1/2 lb. mushrooms
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 tbsp. oil
• Salt and pepper
• 1 lemon
• String the peas. Cook them in boiling, salted water until tender, about 5 minutes, and drain. Slice the mushrooms. Heat the butter and oil in a large frying pan over medium high heat. Add the mushrooms and cook, stirring occasionally, until they’re soft and the liquid has evaporated, 10 to 12 minutes. Add peas, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper and heat through, 2 or 3 minutes. Squeeze 2 teaspoons juice from the lemon. Add the juice right before serving.

I actually think I did most of this right. I didn’t pay attention to any of the ingredient amounts, I just used what I had and tossed in what-looked-like-enough butter and oil. Then I might have slightly overcooked the mushrooms. But otherwise, given my skills—like the fact that I think I might have been sautéing but I’m not sure because I don’t really know what sautéing is, which is probably best because I might have been intimidated by that dumb word and really fucked up the mushrooms, and yet I might have done it right anyway even though I had no idea what I was doing—this one turned out pretty tasty. If I didn’t have so many other kinds of peas to get through I would consider pea week won.