Friday night in the midst of the heat wave, I made a double batch of rice. We had steamed veggies & rice for dinner that night, and the idea was that we’d have fried rice the next night.
Except we went out instead.
The farm didn’t have peas this week, like I expected them to, so we had no snow peas. I really wanted snow peas!
DH loves scallions in fried rice. To me? Any onion will do, we have summer bulb onions and baby leeks, but he wanted scallions.
The answer was obvious, go to the market, which we did. DH stayed in the car and I went in for scallions, snow peas and maybe ice cream or sorbet (we were low). I found the scallions easily enough. Found packages of sugar snap peas, which that wasn’t what I wanted. Eventually, I found a small display of snow peas.
But the tags over the counter said, “Sugar Snap Peas, $7.99/bag” there were bagged Sugar Snap Peas on this counter too. And the other sign with a price for peas on it said, “Sugar Snap Peas, $4.99/lb”. Except there were no loose Sugar Snap Peas there, and no price for the Snow Peas which were?
So I go to the customer service desk. The lady there pages someone from produce. Ends up it’s the only person in produce and they don’t have a price list. End result? I got some snow peas in a bag, went to the frozen food section to get a box if the price was too high. No frozen snow peas. Okay. So I grab a bag of regular Birdseye frozen peas, just in case.
Get to the checker. Tell her “They’re SNOW PEAS!” except she doesn’t have a price for those in the computer or on her list. So, they charged me .80 for my small bag of snow peas (which showed up on the receipt and her computer as Sugar Snap Peas) and I got the bag of frozen peas too.
Then DH made fried rice. And you know what? He forgot to use them, so I still didn’t get my snow peas!
IT’S A PLOT I TELL YOU A PLOT!!! (smirk)
Just so you know, this is a snow pea:
See how it’s flat and you can see the peas through it? It’s a traditional, oriental pea. Wiki article here.
This is a Sugar Snap Pea:
Snap pea article here. Snap peas are modern, you’ll find if you read the article.
Both peas are eaten pods and all. I like Sugar Snap Peas, but not in stir fry, because they take longer to cook and I like the taste of Snow Peas better. No real reason, I just do.
There are 3 basic types of peas btw, the two above and English or shelling peas. Those have more fibrous pods and usually people don’t eat the pods. There is a traditional English soup which uses the pods and mint (I’ve also seen lettuce). You can find a recipes for that by searching for “pea pod soup.”
I never, ever thought I’d write a blog about peas, more, I never thought I’d have a reason to!
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