Pea Picking Time!

Purple Hull Peas

Well it is that time again....pea picking time! For those of you that have a garden you know what I mean. For those of you who do not, well it is simply time to pick peas in my garden. We plant Purple Hull Peas, there are just too many varieties to list. In this post I will explain how to blanch and store peas in the freezer. If you love fresh veggies and I do, then you can easily store fresh veggies in your freezer for those long winter months.The easiest way to explain blanching is to simply click on the word, I have attached a link that will tell you exactly how to do it. Basically all blanching does is slow the enzymes in veggies so they do not lose their color and flavor while frozen.

After you have blanched the peas you need to cool them off. We usally have a big bowl with water and ice, or you can just fill a sink up with cold water and keep the water at a slow stream to keep the water temp down. Remove the peas from the water (you can use a strainer for this). We then spread the peas out on a towel with a fan blowing to finish cooling.

As soon as the peas are cool we take freezer bags (1quart) and fill the bag a little over halfway full. You should also take into account how large of a crowd you will want to feed. For a family of four I use 2 1/2  scoops of a clean, normal size coffee mug (not the extra large size, just a normal generic mug). This seems to work for my family. You should also label the bags with veggie name and the year that they were put up. My grandmother would eat peas up to 2 years old, but this is strickly up to you. I think 1 year is my max.

Once peas have been labeled you should get them into the freezer as soon as possible. Simply lay the bags flat and try not to stack more than 4 bags on top of each other until they have begun to freeze.

I love fresh purple hull peas. It takes me back to my grandmother's kitchen when she would get the pressure cooker out and cook us a mess of peas. I would fill a plate up and put a dolup of real mayo on top! OH, they were the best. This is this season I miss my grandmother most, God rest her soul. I can still see her picking those peas in the pea patch and talking of how good those peas would be in the winter.

Do you have a favorite summer veggie that you put up? How about some trick or tip to putting up those veggies? Would love to hear them, email me or comment if you have any questions. And remember to tell your loved ones how much they mean to you, because no one knows when it will be the last time you get to tell them!

Some Crooked Letters and a Hello…

Hello blogging world! My name is Meadow or Meada for short. I am simply a wife and mother, nothing more nothing less. I live in northern Mississippi. You can remember to spell it the Mississippian way if you like M, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, crooked letter, crooked letter, I, humpback letter, humpback letter, I……seriously that is how I learned how to spell Mississippi!!! Anyway enough with the grade school lesson. My family consist of my hubs Brad, and two of the sweetest, most loving, and handsome boys, if I do say so myself. Their names are Braden (10yo) and Alex (5yo). They get their good side from my family and the rest from their dad’s family……just kidding!

Our home sits in the middle of 30 beautiful acres of woods. No houses next door, no loud cars zooming up and down the road, just the birds chirping and the cicada buzzing. It truly is a little piece of paradise. I am telling you this because this is how I got the name for my blog-Behind the Cedar Posts! When my husband & I were building our home in 2008ish, we were in a quandary as to what to use as porch post. We wanted something large, but also something that would blend into our surroundings. While looking at molding to go in our house, we explained to the owner of the molding place (we will call him molding guy for lack of a better name) that we were looking for porch posts. Anyway to make a long story short, a couple days later we received a call from said molding guy and he told us that he had just acquired some big, long posts of cedar from the local Amish community. He had let the Amish use his portable sawmill and in return they had cut molding guy some cedar posts. So that is how Behind the Cedar Posts blog was born, because I will be sharing, not only tips I have learned on various thing, but some of the happenings of our home, which is behind the cedar porch posts. Wow, that was a long story, sorry!

If you have made it this far in my post then; thank you, thank you, and thank you! I was trying to explain the name without helping to send you off to the land of nod! Ok, standup and stretch…continue reading. Almost done, promise! So my hope for this blog is to vent, I mean talk about issues, and to also tell about some of the money saving tricks my husband and I have learned over our short course of being married for 10 years. I want to also share my journey through going back to college at 30+ years of age. I honestly want comments and feedback that is how one grows. So with this post I say a big ol’ WELCOME to… Behind the Cedar Posts!!!!