Sugar Snap Peas

Yesterday afternoon I was going through some recipes for spring vegetables on Food & Wine when I found this recipe for Sugar Snap Peas with Soffrito, Hot Pepper and Mint. I was immediately drawn to it, and when meal planning shortly after that, I put it on the list for this week. I remembered that Trader Joe's sold bags of sugar snap peas and I thought this would make a tasty and healthy vegetable side dish.

Ingredients:

- generous amount of olive oil for sauteing ($0.40)

- 2 medium carrots, finely chopped ($0.30)

- 3 medium celery ribs, finely chopped ($0.20)

- 1 medium onion, finely chopped ($0.60)

- 1 medium red bell pepper, finely chopped ($1)

- 12 oz sugar snap peas, halved crosswise ($2.99)

- 1 tsp crushed red pepper ($0.05)

- 1/2 cup torn mint leaves ($0.68)

- sea salt ($0.05)

This recipe cost $6.27, so it wasn't exactly cheap for a side dish. But it did make a fair amount of vegetables and it was quite tasty. If you can find sugar snap peas that come out cheaper than $3.99/lb, then you can probably make it for less. In the end, not a terrible price, but not an everyday side dish.

Process:

We followed the recipe very closely on this one, other than not measuring olive oil and using different amounts of vegetables. (For details, the original recipe is here.)

The basic recipe is: heat olive oil, add soffrito vegetables and cook until softened, remove soffrito, add more oil and saute sugar snap peas until bright green, add soffrito, cook 2 minutes, add red pepper flakes + some water, cook a little longer, turn off heat, add mint + salt. Really easy and quick (other than the prep, since finely chopping vegetables took me quite a bit of time).

Review:

We really liked this recipe. The sugar snap peas came out nice and crispy, the red pepper flakes added a good zing, and the mint made it different from your average sauteed vegetables. I didn't notice until after making it that this came from the folks at Gjelina, a restaurant on our Los Angeles "to visit" list that we'll hopefully make it to someday. From this recipe, I can see why people love their dishes so much. We would make this again.