A Pea Salad Luncheon

A salad of Prince Albert peas, pencil thin asparagus, and pea shoots served on a botanically themed platter

Photo: Chronica Domus

On June 15, which happened to fall on Father's Day this year, our second harvest of heirloom Prince Albert peas was ready to be picked.  Out to the garden my daughter ran, basket in hand, to retrieve one hundred and seventy-two bright green and plump pea pods.  I was astonished she had found so many pods that were ripe for the picking, so soon after our initial bounty twelve days earlier.

I received an email from the editor of Lindaraxa, a blog revolving around the writer's passion for entertaining and cooking, with a suggested recipe for using any further peas I might harvest.  The recipe, which can be found here, included an ingredient that was already growing in the garden, but it was one I had not actually considered eating. As it turns out, the young and tender shoots of pea plants, along with their white blossoms and curly tendrils, are edible.  There they were, right under my nose in my very own garden, yet I had not given them more than a passing glance during the entire growing season as I admired their botanical beauty. Ultimately, it was the suggestion of using pea shoots as a component of the salad that swayed me to try Lindaraxa's deliciously fresh and spring-like recipe.  And, I am delighted I did.

Impeccably fresh ingredients for our pea and asparagus salad include freshly shelled peas and their shoots, and Eureka lemons from our tree

Photo: Chronica Domus

The recipe turned out to be one of the easiest ways of preparing fresh peas and asparagus that I had ever attempted.  Aside from the pea shelling, always an agreeable activity for my daughter who treats it more like the unwrapping of Christmas gifts, the entire preparation took less than fifteen minutes.  As the asparagus was already pencil thin, I did not even bother to slice the stalks in half.  I also substituted Eureka lemons freshly picked from Old Faithful, our lemon tree (a subject for a future post, I think), Meyer lemons not being on hand. The salad was so fresh and spring-like in taste, thanks to the addition of the zingy lemon juice and zest, that I dispensed with adding sugar as suggested by the recipe. And what of the pea shoots you might ask?  Well, surprisingly they too were deliciously tender and grass-like, and an unexpected culinary discovery that I shall attempt to incorporate into our cooking whenever we are fortunate enough to have them growing in our garden.

Our Father's Day luncheon, served casually at the kitchen table, was all the more special because not only did my daughter pick the peas for the salad herself, but Lindaraxa made it all possible by reaching out to me with her recipe, and for that I am most thankful.

Can you recall a time you ventured forth and discovered something new and tasty in the culinary world?