Recipe Review: Vegetarian Hoppin' John

How fun was it to wake up on New Years Day to the smell of stuff cooking in the CrockPot? Very fun!

I have read in various places that it is "good luck" to eat black-eyed peas, collard greens, and cornbread on New Years Day. I'm not too big on collard greens, so I decided to skip those. I figured that if events arranged themselves accordingly, I could make cornbread (didn't end up doing it, but that's OK).  And, I came across an interesting sounding recipe for Vegetarian Hoppin' John, so I figured why not?

"Hoppin' Joh" apparently refers to black-eyed peas that have been cooked with rice.  This recipe called for the black-eyed peas, brown rice, onion, tomatoes, chipotle chili, diced and green chili - so, kind of a southwest flavor going on.

I soaked the black-eyed peas during the day on New Year's Eve, then cooked them (with additional ingredients according to the recipe) in the CorckPot on low over night. When we woke up on New Year's Day we could certainly smell the onion and spices!

I thought the Hoppin' John was OK, flavor-wise, though I definitely did not love the texture of the black-eyed peas - too mealy for me. This is pretty much what I expected. GrandmaT  didn't think that the Hoppin' John had very much flavor overall. Mr. Mamie, however,  liked it a lot! It's interesting how three different people can have three different responses to the same food.

We knew that we wanted to save the remaining Hoppin' John for Mr. Mamie to have for weekday lunches, but just freezing it in containers didn't seem very appealing. He hit on the idea of turning it into burrito filling, which was brilliant! So Saturday night Mr. Mamie filled up a couple dozen (smaller sized) flour tortillas with a combination of Hoppin' John and shredded cheese, with plans to add hot sauce and/or sour cream at the time of heating/eating.  He wrapped each burrito in parchment paper and then filled up three gallon-sized Ziploc bags with the burrito bundles.

Sunday afternoon he tried out a Hoppin' John burrito - heated in the microwave and spiced up with some hot taco sauce. The verdict was a thumbs up, and that is how black-eyed peas found their way into frozen burritos!

~Mamie "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro!" (Hunter S. Thompson)