I hate peas, even when they are French.

I came home from work and the boy handed me a box of rotini pasta. "Here," he said, "Make this." Nice. I told him I couldn't make just "that" and he asked for mac & cheese. I said no, because we had four-cheese risotto just yesterday. So, what to do?

I pulled out the pasta cookbook and handed it to the boy. "Here," I said, "Pick something." He whined a bit about being hungry and not wanting to look for a recipe, but he quickly found one that met his needs of

• (a) fast,
• (b) easy,
• (c) food he liked, and
• (d) using rotini pasta

The recipe? Pasta with shrimp and petit pois.

What's petit pois, you say? Answer: Petite peas.

I hate peas.

Hate.

You don't even understand how serious I am when I say that. I gag on the thought of peas. I DESPISE peas, ever since I was a kid and my mom made them all the time. The smell makes me want to leave the room and throw up. But, the boy wanted this recipe, and by some insanely random coincidence, I had both shrimp and petite peas in the freezer.

What kind of idiot keeps peas in her freezer when she can't stand them? That would be me, the mom who knows that it's one of the only vegetables that her kids will eat, and also the mom that knows that frozen peas are ever so SLIGHTLY more tolerable than the most evil food that this world has ever known: canned peas.

So off we go, the boy and I, making pasta and shrimp and petit pois. Olive oil and butter and white wine, salt and pepper and even saffron. The boy got really into it and wouldn't even let me help. This made me extremely happy, as I could remain as far from the peas as physically possible.

The meal was good, and I tried very hard to be ever so subtle about picking out my peas. I even ate a couple by mistake. The pasta did taste very pea-like, but I survived. And all in all, it was worth it because it was fun making dinner with the boy.

Lesson: If you cannot stand peas, but want to cook with them so your kids eat vegetables, DO NOT use rotini pasta because the peas really get stuck in there. Yuk.