I've said before that I'm not a big fan of Paula Deen. But I caught a show in which she made a very tasty Steak Diane that I liked a lot. In the same show, Ms. Butter made a snow pea recipe that also looked interesting, and I'd filed it away for one of those occasions in which I had snow peas I wasn't sure what to do with. That occasion arrived when I bought a bag of fresh snow peas at Trader Joe's without a specific plan for them, a new no-no in my Recipe Directed Shopping Strategy.
Once I'd committed to making the snow peas, I realized I didn't have two essential ingredients: fresh mint and, of all things, orange liqueur. It's in the title of the recipe for Pete's sake, yet I managed to miss it. Fortunately my husband can stop by Safeway on his way home from work, though a bottle of Grand Marnier isn't usually on the emergency grocery list.
Paula calls for frozen snow peas, but I can't abide by them. The whole fun of snow peas is their crunchiness, and the defrosting takes the spunk right out of them.
The recipe calls for boiling the snow peas for a minute in sugared (? don't know why, but I did it) water, draining, then adding the other ingredients until they're all warm. The initial boiling worked great, much better than my usual saute preparation. The peas were bright and crisp and irresistable. The rest was easy to combine, though I wondered about a full quarter-cup of orange liqueur.
ZOW!
My husband immediately said, "That's too strong!" on his first bite -- but to my surprise, he meant the mint. What mint? The orange liqueur just about knocked me down, and in a good way. I loved it, simple but with a nice variety of flavors. The water chestnuts were a nice crunchy companion to the peas, as well as a perfect canvas on which to present the (~burble~) hefty punch of the liqueur.
I think the recipe could do well with half the mint, a little less butter (this is a Paula Deen recipe, after all) and probably a third of the liqueur, but what's the fun in that?
For the record, my kids got broccoli instead, as I'm not sure it'd even be legal to serve this to minors.
You want to get someone's attention with vegetables? This is the way!
!!! Addendum: I apparently didn't pay enough attention to the recipe, and missed one essential little digit: 3. As in, three 10-oz packages of peas, not one. No wonder I thought you could use one-third the liqueur! Note to self: read the darned recipe!
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