Growing up, my brothers and I hated peas. Especially those soft, yellowy ones with their skins coming off. Yuck.
But even though it was out of the question to eat them, peas weren’t totally useless. You could make pea rugs out of them.
The idea was to slide the peas, one at a time, onto the tines of your fork. Each tine would hold maybe six or eight peas. Once you loaded all four tines, you had a mass of solid peas — a pea rug.
If you were really good at this, you could build a perfect rug and then slide the whole thing off onto your plate without disturbing your creation. Add a little milk, it would float.
How funny that just before finding your funny snippet about peas, I added frozen peas to my online grocery order. Starting life on a farm, our fresh veggies, including peas, tasted wonderful. However, I can understand your disdain for peas because the first time I encountered those from a can...pheweee. I wasn't as creative as you were to make a pea rug or even a peapotholder.
Reminds me of when I was a kid (and hated canned corn) I would spit out the corn into my napkin then asked to be excused from the table so that I could flush the napkin down the toilet. Never thought to get creative with my food.
Thanks!