Favorite Meal

It's hard to choose a favorite meal. My family celebrates nearly everything with food and in the years since the kids started leaving for college every homecoming is cause for celebration and each trip home is a blur of barbeques and baking and trips to the grocery store to restock the pantry.

But as I was thinking about it, I remembered a particular meal we used to make every year -- a meal I haven't eaten in far too long. It's called "peasandnewpotatoes" and it's not exactly the height of my family's culinary accomplishments. Boiled potatoes and peas in a plain white sauce speckled with black pepper is just about as exciting as it sounds, but it was special because it was a marker of spring coming back and the beginning of a summer full of trips to the farm to harvest sweet corn and climb the grain elevators and ride around in pick-up beds looking for kangaroo rats.

Preparing peas and new potatoes required a trip out of town across the Snake river, past the turn off to Burbank and all the way to red and white sign for Nedrow Farms. Once on the dirt road that crossed under the power lines we would take off our seatbelts (the only time our parents allowed such behavior) and stand up in the suburban lifting our hands off the seats in front of us and standing sideways like surfers bending our knees to absorb the shock of the potholes. We always stopped at the office first to buy a pop from the antiquated vending machine my dad kept stocked with Pepsi cans. I usually chose a Squirt and wiped the grime off the tab before openning and drinking it down in burp inducing gulps.

Then we'd pile back into the car and drive to the pea fields. A pea field, in case you've never visited one, doesn't smell like a potatoe field or an alfalfa field or a field of green wheat. It smells like peas. Green and sweet. I have a sharp memory of sitting on the top edge of plastic five gallon bucket in one of the pea fields. The edge of the bucket presses into my backside and the backs of my thighs as I grab the peas pods off the bushes (they make a satisfying pop when you pull them free) and shelled them into the bucket, snapping off the stem, sliding my fingernail into the seam until I could fit my thumb into the pod and run it down the length of the inside popping the peas free. Occassionally I would shell a pod directly into my hand and toss all the peas into my mouth at once to eat them raw.

After we had enough peas we would take the buckets and put them into the back of the Suburban and drive to the pea field. Mom always grilled Dad about how recently the field had been sprayed and Dad always reassured her (multiple times) that the potatoes were perfectly safe to eat. Dad would take a shovel and we would follow him into the field until we were past the scrawny plants on the edge and into the thick green ones that made up the central part of the circle. Dad dug the shovel in on one side of three or four hills of potatoes and loosened the dirt so that we could use our hands to pull up the vines and sift through the cool soil to find the potatoes. This time of year, the potatoes were small and round, probably no bigger than walnuts or chicken eggs, and the skin on them was so thin that even rubbing the dirt off with the palm of a hand would peel it off the flesh.

At home, my involvement in the process ended. Mom washed the potatoes and put them, skins and all, into a pot to boil. She didn't boil the peas, but made a white sauce and put the raw peas in it while it was on the stove just to warm them up not to cook them. Pour the sauce on the potatoes and eat it all together.

A few years ago, my dad stopped growing peas. They were too expensive and labor intensive. He switched to bluegrass seed. More recently, he put the farm up for sale. I keep expecting to feel some nostalgia for the place, some regret to see it go. So far it hasn't happened. The farm changed for all of us. The longer we stayed in the farming business the more business and less farming it began to feel. Tightening food safety regulations, rising operating costs, and increasingly demanding processors took the fun out of it.

It's been a long time since I had peas and new potatoes. I'm not even sure I want them again.