Friday June 13
You plant peas in earliest spring, when the weather is sullen and the soil muddy. You wait what seems to be months, your mouth watering for fresh produce, for a few brave vines to struggle up out of the clay. You weed, you mulch. More vines pop up, twining their way wherever you don't want them to go. Squirrels nip at them, and a flower or two blooms. Finally, one morning you notice a few peapods. You pick that tender handful, and they are marvelous. And from that moment, you will have nothing but PEAS, all over every vine, more and more every day until you're sick of them; and if you don't pick them right away every day, they get big and tough and inedible. This is the irony of home gardening.
Our peas are sugar-snaps, but one way to escape the monotony is to shell them as if they were pod peas. We boiled the baby peas and some chopped-up asparagus in the pasta water until they were tender, then fished them out (immediately putting the fettucine in the green water to boil), drained them, and added them to a skillet in which we had boiled down some heavy cream flavored with lemon rind, lemon juice, lemon thyme, and a shot of lemon vodka. I know that's four kinds of lemon, but we were conservative with the rind, and the flavor was fresh, not overpowering.
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