My mom and I seem to have your mom's lima beans cooking skills. But then, I've never had a farm fresh lima bean either -- ours were always soaked and reconstituted from dry. And it didn't look like that many lima beans when they were dry, but they drank up TONS of water and grew to like 8x the original volume and we had lima beans to eat for *weeks.*
I used to hate peas too, because my mom served either canned peas (triple blech) or frozen peas boiled until they were beige (just a double blech because at least they didn't taste like the tin), but then my grandpa grew peas in his garden one year and picked a few pods and handed them to me and I was ADDICTED. I looooooove fresh raw garden peas, who knew? Yummmmm. :)