… Variety, Taste, Nutrition, Modest Cost
(c) 2019, Davd
Eating is more fun if there’s more variety to what you eat. A monotonous diet of fancy food—say, asparagus and sauce Hollandaise every evening of the week—is less enjoyable than a varied diet of good regular fare like—for instance—peas and carrots two days a week, frozen spinach for one, beets cooked plain one evening and picklish another, and two evenings of steamed cabbage with caraway.1 Of the seven evenings, in this hypothetical example, no three have the same vegetable. None of the vegetables listed is half as fancy as asparagus with sauce Hollandaise, but the variety more than makes up for that.
This winter 2019 — and for Canadian gardeners east of Hope and north of Parry Sound, who don’t have greenhouses, it’s still winter in the kitchen, though spring has just begun out in the garden2 — the prices of “fresh” vegetables have been so high that most people with average or lower incomes aren’t buying enough. Plus which, “fresh” vegetables trucked north from somewhere on one side or the other of the US-Mexican border, are not fresh like what a gardener can pick and carry indoors come summer.
In a Canadian winter, living from locally grown basic winter vegetables, the list is fairly small: Beets, cabbage, carrots, onions, turnips and bean sprouts,3 Adding another vegetable to the list really does improve the variety experience.
If you grew many more peas than you wanted to eat, back in late spring and late fall, you might still have a stock of frozen peas. Use them first. Peas are frost-tolerant. They can be seeded now and the first fresh pods picked in June, the peas themselves, still tender, in July.
But today, it’s early May. Most gardeners are out of frozen peas. Carrots are losing quality. And cabbage in the supermarket was priced above $1.25 per pound.
That’s my situation too: I had some carrots that were losing quality but still fit to eat, and a few kilos of dried whole green peas. Fresh peas and carrots would be very expensive; so I made a quite tasty pot of peas and carrots from what I had.
I brought maybe a litre of water to boiling, soaked two cups of dried peas in that water, and when they had swelled to about full size4, and added a half teaspoon of soda, because legumes [“pulses”] including peas, cook more quickly if the water is slightly alkaline. I brought them to the boil and lowered the heat to where the peas were barely boiling.
An hour or two later, when a pea taken from the pot was almost as soft as I wanted for eating as cooked vegetable, I chopped the softest, least appealing carrots. From one or two i had to cut off doubtful looking parts; but the rest looked and smelled like carrots still fit to eat. That chopped carrot was added to the pot, the bot brought back to boiling, and I cooked the carrots 10-20 minutes.
While the carrots were cooking, I chopped a thin slice of onion and added that to the pot. Thin and chopped, it needed very little cooking time; and its flavour worked through the broth.
The result tasted mighty good! Not gourmet, but good, somewhat hearty, winter vegetables that at most, cost me 40 cents per pound plus cooking energy. I hadn’t eaten peas in weeks; so the change of taste was a positive experience. With rice and canned diced tomatoes, those peas and carrots made a protein balanced, meatless, satisfying meal.
I hadn’t planned to publish this technique this year; it’s marginal between cooking vegetables and cooking pulses for meatless meals with adequate protein. What has me publishing it now, is
‣ the high price of trucked “fresh” vegetables and the facts that it offers
‣ a good use for carrots gone soft but not rotten; and
‣ a way to use dried whole peas as a “vegetable” that also provides good protein and fibre contributions to your diet.
This is frugal, “poor people’s food.” It can be a blessing in variety of taste and texture, and in nutrition, if you like me, aren’t rich.
