My toddler daughter prefers to tear her food apart rather than learn to use her knife and fork. To keep her calorie intake high enough, her diet has consisted of foods she can handle and dissect: cheese cubes, green beans, pepperoni, sausage, home-mixed fruit salad from a can, and toast sticks, as a few examples. We kept finding ourselves coming up short overall with vegetables. Anything small she liked to smush between her fingers then fling at the cats. Feeding her off of a spoon or fork and she would treat it like a patient resisting drugs: hide it in her mouth and then spit it out when no one is looking, or she couldn’t take it any longer. Larger items, like whole green beans, were also turned into projectiles heading quickly to the floor. A few nights ago, we tried giving her sugar snap peas. Instead of crushing them like a gleeful tyrant, she tore them open and sucked out the peas. Success, she was eating more greens!
Not trusting that this would be a recurring event, the experiment was repeated over several days and multiple meals. She continued to eat the peas without realizing that these minuscule green morsels were good for her.
We were lucky. Our local grocery store, Giant, had moved edamame to the forefront of the frozen vegetable case so my wife picked up a bag. Tonight we moved on the experiment forward and were again pleased by the results. The Terrible Toddler loved them and so did Daddy.
I fell in love with this vegetable for two main reasons: quick to cook and great taste. In the time it takes to prep the evening meal they are done cooking and can be left to cool while everything else is finished.
The initial taste reminds me of my favorite bean: the Lima. Buttery, a little sweet, but with a smooth, creamy texture. If you’ve ever cooked dried, frozen, or even canned limas, then you know that the texture can range from fine grit to total mush. To me the perfect bean is firm at first bite but goes soft and tender. Instead of playing bean roulette, each and every edamame was just right.
One place where they were different from my much beloved bean, was in the finish. An aftertaste best described as green remained. Green like the smell of a fresh cut lawn, not the a newly chewed one. Combined with the buttery feel in my mouth it was not unpleasant in the least, bring forth memories of raw milk sold by a local organic dairy. Spring, as we set in for a cold winter with a large snow storm approaching from the Gulf of Mexico. When the wind blows and the days are short, with long dark nights, I will cook a few up and remember warmer times.
