Freezing Peas!

It's funny how the entire harvest seems to come in at one time... ours and the other gardens around town. After all the canning of the green beans last weekend, it seemed we spent a lot of time in the evenings after work this past week shelling peas. We bunch we picked in the garden last week just seemed to take forever to shell... but, we finally finished late Friday night.

Lots of shelling in front of the television. I guess you could say it's a lot like the old days when I use to spend hours shelling peas with my Grandparents... same shelling metal pan, same house... except for us having the AC, cable TV, internet, and cell phones it is pretty much the same task!

My plan was to shell the peas during the week days and then prepare them for the freezer on Saturday. And then I got the call that the farm in town had me a bushel of zipper peas. That's a bunch more work... so I brought in the recruit to help shell on Saturday once I picked up the zipper peas.

Meet my Mom. She is a shelling machine. On Saturday, she shelled and I rinsed the bushel and a half of purple hulled/pink eyed peas from our garden multiple times, looked them over handful by handful for the wormy ones, blanched them and bagged them for the freezer... and I shelled zipper peas in between all the boilings. Hubby even helped get the zippers shelled. We had a nice time grilling steaks and shelling for a Saturday night!

By Saturday evening, the purple hulls/pink eyes were in the freezer and all of the new bushel of zippers were shelled and in the fridge for rinsing/blanching/bagging for the freezer at a later date.

And then Hubby showed up with this harvest from the garden... Ouch.