Recipes: Peas, Please or An Early Summer Dinner
We’re in the first flush of produce from the garden and, because of a cool, damp spring, I’m getting a bumper crop of peas. It’s one of my favorite vegetables to grow because they’re so delicious right from the garden but do not benefit from the passage time, so having them right outside the door makes a big difference. Last weekend, with a gorgeous forecast for the first full day of summer and my pea plants laden with pods, I invited some friends over for dinner on the back porch to celebrate summer.
One of my favorite salads to serve for company is Melissa Clarke’s Radish and Herb Salad with Meyer Lemon Dressing that I found in the NY Times a few years ago. Instead of lettuce greens, the base of the salad is composed of parsley leaves, celery leaves, and the fronds from fennel (also called anise, as I discovered when I had to look it up in the self-check out). The fennel/anise bulb is thinly sliced, as are celery and radishes. I use watermelon radishes because they’re so pretty (In fact, I added these radishes to my garden just so I’d have them on hand for this salad.) but any will do. If using a kitchen mandolin, set on the thinnest setting; it gives the sliced vegetables a translucence that compliments the airy greens. If you can’t find Meyer lemons—it took me four stops before I did—you can substitute ½ lemon juice with ½ orange juice. My edible flowers didn’t bloom until a few days after this dinner or else I would have added borage and/or nasturtium blossoms for added prettiness.
Also on the menu was the roasted beet salad with arugula and olives from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, which I wrote about here last year; it was my gateway recipe into eating beets. I had longed to like beets for the longest time, because they look so pretty on a plate, and this was the recipe that did the trick. Beets can be found in my garden but I use them for their greens all summer and only pull up the root in the fall. My local farmers’ market offered gorgeous beets this past weekend; the roots went into the salad and the greens and stems went into a savory breakfast. I have an egg and veggie sausage topped with sautéed greens mixed with stewed tomatoes. That extra bit of fiber and veg makes the difference to get me to lunchtime. Got some stewed tomatoes canned up last year for just this purpose and then I just vary the greens—Swiss chard, kale, beet, spinach, bok choy, and such—from week to week.
The entrée was a snap-pea ricotta tart from an ancient Vegetarian Times. It comes together very quickly, with the entire filling whizzed together in a food processor, and can be served at any temperature; I baked it so that it came out of the oven about 15 minutes before company arrival time so that I didn’t have to do anything but cut it while they were here, and it was served still warm. I swapped out the butter pastry for a whole-wheat olive oil crust from Chocolate and Zucchini, a non-fussy dough that I use a lot and is a nice foil for the richness of the ricotta. I often will make my own ricotta, using Smitten Kitchen’s recipe. I know it sounds ridiculous to make it but it’s very little hands-on time and the result is really fabulous.
I planted three varieties of peas this year and they’ve been going gangbusters: snap peas and two different kinds of shelling peas, to see which ones I prefer. I‘ve already gotten several rounds frozen for the winter, as when they’re ready they won’t wait. I’ve heard that one old pod will signal the plant to stop producing so I’ve been doing my best to keep up, getting them off the plants, shelled, blanched and into the freezer within minutes of harvesting.
For dessert we had my go-to Cook’s Illustrated strawberry-rhubarb pie, my third iteration of this pie in as many weekends (The first was the traditional birthday pie for my now-former neighbor, the second was for me although shared widely, and the third for this dinner.) While it is a superb recipe, I am now officially done with this dessert for the season. I had some kind of brain hiccup and got way too many strawberries at the farmers’ market—must have been thinking pints but buying quarts. Strawberries get funky so quickly that I did a little internet searching and found this tip for strawberry storage from Shari’s Berries that really helped: a quick soak in a vinegar-water solution, air dry, then store. They say that the berries will keep up to two weeks but there’s never been a berry around that long in my house ever. I can vouch for a full week, however. I hope it works on raspberries, because my bushes are just about to explode.
I do love having friends over and we were blessed with a gorgeous evening to sit out on the porch. Being able to celebrate the garden season (the parsley, radishes, arugula, and snap peas were from the garden that morning) and good conversation is right up there with my most favorite things to do.