Black-Eyed Peas and Rice.

You know, sometimes you just need some good old comfort food.  Today, for whatever reason – and it’s been a good day, an excellent one in fact, filled with good hard work at the office, a predawn run in autumnal weather, and a wonderful hour spent at the animal shelter when the workday was done – I was in need of a down-home favorite.  So of course I turned to black-eyed peas and rice!  It never disappoints.

Now, there are a zillion different ways of preparing black-eyed peas, and I’ve tried most of them.  But tonight I settled on my favorite method. I took a bag of dried peas, put them in a large pot and set them to boil, seasoning them with Cajun seasoning and a sensible amount of hot sauce.  After 45 minutes or so, most of the water had cooked out, and the beans themselves were nice and soft.

You’ll notice I didn’t take the time to presoak my peas – when I began cooking in my first apartment, I used black-eyed peas as a great meal-stretcher, and I’d never noticed that my mother soaked her beans before cooking.  Since I was ignorant of this method, I was free not to use it, and so I haven’t, and no one has been the wiser.  (I’m sure there’s some sort of study out there that says not presoaking black-eyed peas is awful for me, but I am ignorant of that too! ;))

About half an hour into the cooking process, I flipped on my rice cooker and got my white rice prepared.  The nice thing about the rice cooker is if the rice is ready before the peas are, it can just sit in the cooker and remain warm without overcooking.  This forgiveness goes a long way when cooking dried peas, since the timing is never cut-and-….OK, cut-and-dried. ;)  Ahem.  Pardon me.

Once the black-eyed peas were soft enough for my liking, I turned off the heat, got my plate, spooned on a dollop of rice and topped the rice with the peas.  Served with some Parmesan cheese, Tabasco, and nutritional yeast, it was a complete, healthy, and incredibly inexpensive meal!  And it makes enough leftovers to take care of LeeLee and me for the rest of the week.  Nothing’s better than that!

:)