I want to take this opportunity to sing the praises of frozen peas, with particular emphasis on frozen.
This will require a little detour, so bear with me.
Here’s an image from a bygone era. A delivery arrives at the door: a paper sack full of small plastic bags and containers, each neatly labeled with an ingredient sticker. Attached is a sheet that explains how to warm up individual components, how to chop x, when to drizzle y, where to sprinkle z.
With the best intentions, you follow the instructions strictly. There are three saucepans on the go, two cutting boards, a citrus juicer and a garlic mincer. The grill is red-hot, ready to receive the Wagyu steak or a haunch of butternut. It’s 10 minutes until dinner. The stress is unbearable, when you realize that the ginger that’s clearly listed isn’t there, that the “cilantro” is actually cake sprinkles and that there’s no mention of the bag of potatoes sitting proudly on your counter. In despair, you forget about the instructions and start to improvise, disastrously.
Or you order a pizza.
This was the early days of Covid, when fine dining tried to survive by suggesting that we could “assemble” at home what a brigade of highly trained chefs cook to order in a million-dollar restaurant kitchen. It didn’t work. My restaurants, too, though more casual, didn’t do well on this front. Some types of food, the pandemic era taught us, just don’t translate to delivery. Others are meant for it. Pizza is perfect. Wagyu steak with a miso emulsion less so.
Recipe: Spiced pea stew with yogurt
As it was for many of us, Covid was when I rediscovered my pantry — kitchen cupboard, freezer, spice rack, vegetable basket and fruit bowl — and realized how incredibly valuable it was. Just like the pizza delivery that we all take for granted, a good pantry is packed full of Plan B ingredients in case you didn’t get a chance to get something fresh on the way back from work. Or in case you just couldn’t leave the house.
I made my tinned beans, frozen corn and dried chiles work overtime for me, alongside the humble residents of the allium drawer (garlic and onion are a godsend, with their long shelf life). Flour, rice and pasta, tinned tomatoes, olive oil, nuts, spices — a treasure trove with a virtually unlimited life span, ready to be turned into a meal if you run out of options.
I can’t count the number of times I emptied a can of chickpeas into a pot, added plenty of olive oil, some stock, a few whole garlic cloves, a tablespoon of tomato paste, a dried chile and whatever hard herb I happened to have and left this to simmer for about an hour, before pouring onto a bowl of pasta. Such an effortless way to get something truly delicious onto the table.
Yet if there is one thing that, for me, earns the title of star pantry ingredient, hands down, it is frozen peas. Not only are they versatile, ready almost immediately, they are also as good as, if not better than, the real thing. As much as I like eating fresh peas in season, by the time I get my hands on them in a Central London grocer, they are often just not as good. They also need shelling, which takes time. The frozen version is perfect!
I learned this from my mother, years before Covid and my newfound obsession with my pantry. It was she who taught me the simple art of introducing frozen peas, which she always had on hand when I was growing up, into practically any meal. The simplest way — her signature — was sautéing sliced garlic in butter and olive oil until just translucent, then adding the frozen peas, a bit of water, some powdered stock (a favorite pantry ingredients of hers and mine, I have to confess), grated nutmeg and a pinch of sugar. Five minutes on a low simmer, and it’s ready to serve, alongside fish or poached chicken. She would use frozen peas for frittatas, soups, picnic salads and even a quick curry, with tomatoes, potatoes and coconut, which is not too far from my pea stew here.
The trouble was, it wasn’t just peas. Typically of the ’70s and ’80s, my working mother adored her freezer, using it in a completely different way from how I do today. For me, the freezer is home to weekly batch cooking, good sliced bread, leftovers I refuse to let go of and a handful of selected vegetables: spinach, broad beans, corn and peas. Her freezer used to host fish fillets in perfectly square blocks (I was always baffled by those), convenience veggie schnitzels, oven fries and a bunch of vegetables that, by and large, were a pale version of the fresh variety. Carrots come to mind, limp and bland, and broccoli, which no matter how hard you tried was always soft and waterlogged.
Frozen peas were the outliers, daredevil defiers of the seasons. You see, just as only some foods are right for home delivery, there’s only one vegetable that’s simply made for the freezer, regardless of everyone’s best intentions — and the era.
The post The Ingredient You Should Always Have in Your Freezer (and How to Use It) appeared first on New York Times.
