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Last year, my friend Andi shared this post on sprouting.  I was totally intrigued by the sprouted peas. Especially the cost of those peas. $8.05 for 25 pounds seemed like a steal!   I had to try them.  Like everything, the price of these peas has increased. I got mine through Azure Standard. Today’s cost is $10.30 for 25 pounds or $3.05 for 5 pounds.  For just over 41 cents a pound (25 pound bag) that is still very inexpensive!  But how do they taste you ask? Yeah, I wondered. In fact it took me some time to actually get around to trying them.  I have to say, once I finally got around to it, my entire family was super impressed.

Stretchy Beans

Whole Peas were our Stretchy Bean last week. I love doing Stretchy Beans where we take one type of bean/legume and transform it into 3 or 4 meals.   This works very well for me due to several reasons.

  1. Often times I cook a large pot of beans which means the time consuming parts (soaking and cooking) has been taken care of so I now have the means to prepare a quick meal.
  2. By deciding on a bean I know what my main dish will consist of for those 3 or 4 meals and no real thinking is needed on my part (always a plus!)
  3. Beans are fairly inexpensive and really help us stretch our food dollars plus we like them for food storage (see this post on how eating beans can increase your food storage)

I loved the idea of having the peas sprouted. With it being the dead of winter, I find sprouting to be particularly wonderful.  Sprouting is a great way to reduce the phytic acid and other anti-nutrients in your grains, seeds, nuts and legumes. Sprouting also increases many of the vitamins in these items.  I should tell you, I do not have a fancy sprouter or anything (I do hear they are quite nice though). I either sprout in a jar (for small items) or in a colander (large items like these peas).  Turns out great! I’ll share with you what I did for our Stretchy Peas.

 

Soak

First, these peas are small little dehydrated things just like the kind you would plant in the ground.  The first thing I did was put 4 1/2 cups of the peas to soak in water with a bit of whey added (1 tablespoon whey per cup of water is what I did). I let that soak for 24 hours. I intended to only soak half that time but that is how my day went.

Soup

Next, I decided that our first meal would be a soup. I took 4 cups of the now plump peas out. I had decided that I’d follow the recipe for Pea Soup in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon.  Well, I mostly followed it. OK, let’s say I used it as a guide. Her pea soup is for fresh or frozen peas and of course that was not what I was using. The soup also has onions and chicken stock.  And I decided to add some spices to it– cumin and turmeric. Next time, I’ll omit the cumin but the turmeric was wonderful.  The whole thing is pureed and then topped with sour cream at serving. It was really quite tasty!

Sprout

Our second meal was based on Egg Foo Yung. I really like Egg Foo Yung and have made it with mung bean sprouts before. I was hopeful that substituting the peas would work out well. Mung beans are considerably more expensive than these peas.  I had decided to give the peas an extra sprout day between the soup.  This allowed a nice tail on the peas. I have to say, I was wonderfully pleased with the results of this Egg Foo Yung! It was a nice blend of veggies and peas and egg topped with a bone broth gravy. Spectacular! You can see the recipe for Sprouted Pea Egg Foo Yung here.

Our third meal was a Sprouted Pea Salad. Based on the concept of a sprouted lentil salad. First, I steamed the peas for about 30 minutes to make sure they were nice and soft. Then I allowed them to cool to room temperature.  Next we mixed in all sort of bite sized vegetables, chunks of cheese, diced avocado and topped it with one of my Design a Dressing concoctions.  Then each person could add either leftover salmon or leftover browned beef to their salad. It was a huge hit.  The salad made enough for lunch the next day.

Whole peas are definitely a keeper for my house! Good thing since I have 25 pounds of them 🙂 I’m already thinking of recipes I can create to use them in next time.  For sure, any split pea style soup would work great with whole peas. Plus I’m thinking Sprouted Pea Patties might be nice or a Sprouted Pea Dip. I suspect that they will work in many of the same applications as lentils or  Mung beans do. Let the experiments begin!

 

What do you think? Would you try these peas?
What would you create?

This post is shared at Simple Lives Thursday

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