Saturday 8 March 2008

Give peas a chance

carlin peas

Sometimes I shock myself.

Just recently I've started reading a blog by another foodie - David Hall on bookthecook. David is keen on regional cooking and did a post about Carlin Sunday, the Sunday before Palm Sunday in the xian calendar which in the north east of England is celebrated with a dish of hard little black peas called carlins. Other names for these, just to add to the confusion are Maple peas, Black peas or Pigeon peas. There is an interesting site about beans here. David created a recipe but admitted he had been unable to source any actual carlin peas.

And that's the reason for my shock - because I had a packet of Carlin pea seeds from the Heritage Seed Library which I requested last year and then failed to sow. In fact when I went to look I had two unopened packets although Gaia knows how long the second one has been in storage. And so I commented on his blog "I'll try to get them in the ground this year and hopefully we'll all be able to see what happens."

There's a task set that I might have avoided! The peas are having a short soak in an attempt to break their dormancy and then I'll be planting them up later today. A photo blog will follow.

Regular readers - do I have any? do say! - may have noticed a new link in the sidebar exhorting them to Buy my work. There's not a lot there at the moment but I'm really having to diversify and explore every avenue to raise some income, so if you feel like supporting a struggling artist, do take a look.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do I count as a regular /occasional/ reader?...

Catofstripes said...

I think you probably do!