Dave’s Georgia Black Eyed Peas

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The traditional Southern prep for black-eyed peas is with ham, corn bread, and collard greens. Collard greens are pretty hard to find in Vancouver so skipped those (could have substituted with kale I guess but substituted with eating more chocolate instead).

I picked this black-eyed peas recipe because not only do I want us all to have some luck in the new year, right now I’d like to send bonus luck to Georgia and its senate race! Fingers crossed.

It also involves melting butter in your bacon grease, so, yeah. It is a bold choice.

Recipe: Dave’s Georgia Black Eyed Peas (with Honey Skillet Cornbread on the side)

Prep

Not many substitutions! A few tips:

• I like cutting my bacon up with scissors before cooking in a recipe like this. Makes for easy cooking and saves cutting/crumbling step.
• used black forest ham from deli (asked them to cut it thick) and it was great. I think maybe higher quality than prepacked supermarket ham?
• had soaked the beans overnight — only cooked it for about 6hrs but seemed enough
• turn the heat up really high when cooking the onions in the bacon fat + butter. You are basically deep frying them a bit.
• keep the lid off while simmering for some of the liquid to steam off.
• for the corn bread only half of our eaters liked corn kernels in it so I just sprinkled then mixed it in as last step in half the pan, after pouring it all in. worked great
• I didn’t have buttermilk on hand so just put 1tbsp of vinegar into a cup of milk about 5 minutes ahead of time
• the cornbread didn’t rise very much but was very tasty
• a few people ate the beans with rice or cauliflower rice as well
• it makes a lot! we have a lot of leftovers.

Verdict?

Yummy! Felt pretty darn indulgent with all the butter, but really tasty. Maybe a bit too salty for me… I did add some salt, in retrospect I wish I hadn’t added any.

The cornbread was great, a keeper.