Pasta Primavera: It's not easy being green

Or Khaki.  That’s what color the peas were that my mother served us as kids.  Right out of the can, heated in their own liquid. 

Serious Ick Factor. 

Then spooned onto your plate just when you thought dinner was going to be alright.  You weren’t allowed to leave the table until you ate your peas. 

Mushy to boot.

Having delayed their consumption until the bitter end, they were now cold as well.  My first attempt would be to bury them in a spoonful of mashed potatoes and swallow them whole, but that rarely worked.   I would end up just trying to figure out how to hide them in my napkin, the potatoes, my shirt sleeve, even in my mouth until I could get outside or into the bathroom and spit them out.

Flash forward:  I’m standing at the Farmers Market in CA, paying $7 for a basket of fresh shelled peas.

Flash forward some more:  I’m making chicken pot pie for Grace The Girl, having only met her a few weeks prior where I saw her demolish a chicken pot pie at The Griswold Inn.

Chris: “Chicken Pot Pie is her favorite.”

My mom made the best chicken pot pie.  She was a pie-maker and made the best crust on the planet.  The ingredients were simple:  chicken, chicken stock slightly thickened, peas and carrots.  I could have lived without the peas, but for this dish we were allowed to pick around them.   With the advent of frozen peas, this might not have been necessary, but our taste buds were too tainted to try them.

As I’m spooning filling into the pie shell, I realize I have put nearly an entire box of frozen peas into a 9 inch pie.  The last thing I wanted was to have this seven year old think dinner at my house was punishment, so I painstakingly spooned the filling back into the bowl, and picked out more than half the peas.

Grace:  “Peas are my favorite.” 

Of course they are. 

As Grace and I decorated for Spring with indoor Easter Egg Trees, we got inspired and made this Italian Classic:  Pasta Primavera.  The perfect dish to use up the last bit of frozen New Year's ham, and the first fresh peas of the season.

Update on Monday, September 5, 2016 at 12:29PM by Margot

I lost my kitchen slave this year.  Yup, Grace the Girl is away for a year on a foreign exchange program in Switzerland.  But I might have a candidate for a pitch hitter.  His name is Reeve and he is just going to be 12 years old this week.  His mom and I are very close friends, and she mentioned that he had fettuccine alfredo for the first time a few weeks ago, on his first trip to Little Italy.

Reeve:  Mom, i can't believe you've kept this away from me all these years.

Mom:  Maybe Margot will teach us how to make it.

Me:  Sure thing.  All you have to do is grate the cheese.

That is seriously the only real work to this recipe.  You can buy it grated, but you don't know what you're getting. You can grind it in the food processor, but that's chopping it, and it takes a long time to melt.  So, get your guests to do the hard labor.  Once they realize how easy this is, they probably won't show up at your house anymore.