Creamed peas and new potatoes

My mom and all her family knew how to make vegetables fattening... and delicious! Mother put cream on turnips, carrots, and peas; she wasn't above sneaking a little sugar in those, either. Every year in June, the peas in the garden would be ready for picking, and we'd have creamed peas and new potatoes.

Cliff only planted a small row of peas in his experimental garden... "Just enough for a mess or two," he said. The rabbits did damage to some of the plants, but today I found enough for a couple of meals for me and Cliff. I told him to pull up a couple of potato plants and get our other vital ingredient, new potatoes.

Now my mom used real cream, taken from the top of a jar of un-homogenized milk, for the cream sauce on veggies. We only use cream on special occasions here, since Cliff's heart surgery, so I used low-fat milk and thickened it a little with corn starch. I did, however, add a tablespoon of real butter so we'd taste a little bit of fat.

My four-month-old Jersey heifer is waiting in the wings, and in eighteen months or so, she'll be providing us with real, honest-to-goodness cream so thick it heaps up on the spoon if you dip into it. We'll still only use it occasionally and with discretion. See her future udder?



I had a cup-and-a-half of cooked chicken I needed to use, so I also made chicken gumbo. That's store-bought frozen okra, by the way.

I suggested to Cliff he plant a few okra plants. He'll love watching them grow!