Gathering peas, both wild and tame

Just enough to snack on. Just for a few weeks a year.

As of this June, we’ve lived in Portland for five years. Or, as Christian and I keep saying, two and a half years plus a pandemic.

Five years feels like a much shorter timeframe than it did in my 30s and 40s, but I haven’t shaken off the sense that we still haven’t settled in. During the four years I lived in Seattle, I was a restaurant critic who constantly drove around the area, recruiting people to join me for meals. By the time I moved back to San Francisco, I knew Seattle, and was gutted to leave all the coworkers and friends I had come to adore. In my new life, my husband and I both work from home, so we rarely leave our neighborhood. We adore our friends, but our circles are smaller. And Portland hasn’t quite recovered from long COVID. As a city, we’re still a little brain-fogged and short of breath.

More and more, though, I’ve come to accept that my post-move limbo, extended and intensified by the pandemic, has actually become my life. And there are weeks like this one, when the peas are at their peak, when the gifts of this new life are so obvious and present.

By peas, I mean the wild ones and the tame ones just a few steps from my front door.

One of the fantasies that Christian and I entertained during our nine years living in a one-bedroom in the Upper Haight was the thought of walking out our door to pluck a handful of herbs or a bunch of lettuce from the garden. We had a tiny raised bed in a community garden, but getting there meant trudging down two flights of stairs, dodging the paranoid meth dealer who’d claimed our stretch of sidewalk, then walking 15 minutes to our plot. All of my middle-class, middle-aged fantasies centered around tending a garden, cooking in a way that would feel both impromptu and rooted in place.

Yesterday, I was out in the front yard in shorts and clogs, picking snow peas off the trellis, when an echo from that San Francisco fantasy finally caught up with me.

For the past four springs, I have planted enough snow peas to take over a trellis—just enough to snack on, not to cook with. The sight of purple pea flowers climbing up the rusted-steel arch is as pleasurable as the flavor of pods I tuck into my shirt pocket as I water the garden.

The other peas have hit their peak this week, too. The shoulders of the roads and bike trails around North Portland are now polka-dotted with bright pink perennial peas. Oregon classifies Lathyrus latifolius as a class-B invasive species, the institutional equivalent of a resigned shrug. By mid-July, the grass will all dry out but the perennial peas will continue to flourish, spindly green vines and hot-pink blooms standing out from the khaki-colored landscape.

A few days ago, inspired by Oregon foraging experts John Kallas and Sergei Boutenko, I walked over to the only stretch of roadside where the wild peas haven’t collected dust and exhaust: the pedestrian zone of Willamette Boulevard that curls around our neighborhood’s beloved dog park. There, the vines of the perennial peas are finally higher than my knees, meaning the pea tips now grow above the dog-pee line. And, for just a little longer, they’re still tender enough to eat.

For a half-hour I followed the bluff, snapping off sprouts and tendrils, my pace barely faster than kinhin meditation. It was a lazy kind of labor, slowed down by the sun and the view. Unlike cultivated pea shoots, the perennial pea shoots were small, plump clutches of ridged leaves. The occasional pink flower made its way into my bag, too.

Just as I had gathered enough to cook, a woman who lived across the street left her house just to ask me what I was gathering. I showed her the shoots, and she popped one into her mouth. “They taste just like peas!” she said. “How have I ignored this for all these years? I thought they were poisonous?” We traded names, but as I walked back home, hers slipped away. Which was a shame, because she has an apple tree I’ve been wanting to glean from.

Her second question made me double-check the edibility of wild peas. Google served up dozens of warnings about Lathyrus latifolius, some of them from official-looking sources: Perennial pea seeds are toxic, these sites said; if you eat too much, they can cause lathyrism, or neurological damage. At the same time, the foraging expert Hank Shaw defends the safety of eating Lathyrus latifolius, particularly the greens, and Samuel Thayer enthusiastically recommends wild beach peas, a cousin species. If you’re interested in gathering perennial pea tips, you should read both sides and determine your own tolerance for risk.

As for me, I washed the wild pea shoots, while noshing on just-picked snow peas, and stir-fried a fistful of the greens with a minced garlic scape, a tiny splash of fish sauce, and ground white pepper. The pea flavor was present, transposed down an octave, and the shoots had none of the bitterness of most wild greens.

I enjoyed them so much I dined on wild pea shoots the next night. Now I’ll wait a year to do it again. Another new ritual to mark the seasons in Portland. Another part of this new life to anticipate. A new life that feels, after five years, less and less new.

*****

Other delicious things to eat in Portland

Gather wild fennel fronds now, while they’re tender and before flowers appear

Local bamboo shoots? I had no idea!

Collect grape leaves for dolmas before they stiffen and grow shiny

Don’t let the garlic scapes go to waste

Self-promotion alert: I’m a talking head on the new Nat Geo series World Eats Bread (streaming on Hulu). Hippie kids and sourdough bread!