Here in Qatar I recently found sugar snap peas, clearly imported. Although I am distinctly not a legume eater, I learned long ago that snap peas and green peas are two very diferent plants with very different taste and texture sensations. I’ve been eating them for a few weeks and will continue to as long as they are available. Eaten as snacks they are great, chopped and added to tuna fish salad a very nice replacement for celery. They take me back well over twenty years to a 1000-acre mid-19th c. farm on the R.I. Connecticut border where I was fortunate to spend many week-ends over the course of three + years. For a couple summers I planted and farmed a good-sized vegetable garden. One summer, after excavating original front walkway stones, I started an herb garden in the shelter of the front door. But the snap peas belong in the garden.
For the vegetable garden, I planted the vegetables we liked to eat and knew would grow: tomatoes, corn, snap peas, zucchini (for the flowers), basil etc. I had learned to love fiore di zucchini when excavating in Southern Italy. Dipped in a light flour, egg and spice mix and then quickly fried they are very tasty even if, despite some Italian beliefs, they are not aphrodisiacs. (I offer a piece on summer squash flowers - the link in the title if you are interested.) The two horses on the farm were allowed free range of the grounds after haying so we clearly needed to safeguard the garden and did so with electrical fencing. It worked well until one evening when one of us forgot to turn the fence back on after weeding and watering. The next morning we found that the garden had been decimated and the horses almost seemed to be groaning from vegetables consumed: all the corn and my second crop of snap peas, tomatoes, zucchini and indeed everything edible. If sentient beings they’d have thought they died and gone to heaven. It was the snap peas I missed the most. And now I have them here in Qatar and they take me back to kind thoughts of the horses and the garden.
