"Surprise" peas

were around in my childhood. 
I was reminded of them yesterday when someone I know mentioned she was researching something to do with "survivalist preparations."
I do not know much about such preparations but I do know something about the peas....and other dried oddities.
In my kittenhood my parents were appointed to a two teacher school in a very remote location. It was not quite "the outback" but it was on the edge of it.
The little "town" was bigger than some. It had seventeen houses. It also had a "general store". There was a counter in the general store which was "the post office" and a petrol pump. There was also a branch of the state's bank, a police station, a pub, and a community hall.  Slightly away from all this was the two teacher school and the railway siding. This hamlet - it wasn't really much more - had these things because this was where you left from to go to the "stations" to the north-west. It was a departure point for the vast sheep stations and the biggest salt lakes.
Food was an issue in that community. When we arrived one of the local farmers came to see Mum. He had some sort of contract to supply meat to everyone in the town. He would, he told her, supply a hind quarter of mutton one week and a fore quarter of mutton the next. That was it. There was no choice. You had that or nothing. Mum took it of course.
But what do about vegetables. It was the only place we ever lived in that the Senior Cat did not have a vegetable garden. The earth was the dry ochre dusty earth of the desert. The water came from a reservoir more than two hundred kilometres away. It was salty and, in summer, often too hot to put your hands in to wash them. Rainwater was scarce and used for drinking.
The general store held a solution of sorts. You could buy potatoes and pumpkin there. If you were very lucky you might be able to buy a few carrots. (Word would go around about the carrots. All the children would line up outside waiting to see if their mothers had managed to buy enough carrots to allow them to give at least a piece of carrot to each child. We treated carrots the same way some children now treat sweets.)
There was also something quite new to the general store. I don't know how long they had been around before then but I can remember the store owner telling the women of the township about the new item he was bringing in. Peas! 
We were going to have peas? Yes! 
The peas came in little packets. They were dried in some way and you had to reconstitute them. There were beans as well but Mum didn't bother with those for some reason. She did buy the peas. She also bought packets of dehydrated mixed vegetables. 
Night after night after night we sat down to much the same meal - mutton stew with potato, pumpkin and peas. 
About once a month we would head off to a much larger town on the coast. Mum would go to the tiny green grocer there.  She would buy carrots and beans and apples. If they had any she might buy us a banana each. That was about it. We would go back to the potatoes, the pumpkin - and those strange "surprise" peas. 
I suppose they were healthy enough. We kittens didn't get scurvy anyway.
The soup mixes you can now get and mix up in a cup always remind me of those peas. Some flavours actually have peas in them. I looked at one the other day. 
The peas were an unlikely shade of bright green. Were the "surprise" peas that shade too?