Black-eyed peas and collard greens are a Southern New Years tradition. We had them every New Years Day in my house growing up - not to mention various other times throughout the year. It's a tasty, easily vegan meal, and will bring you luck and prosperity throughout the coming year. (Or so the story goes.)
There isn't anything difficult about making this meal. I never use a recipe, and so I only have general guidelines to offer you. The full Southern version involves a ham-hock and god only knows what other meat products. I promise you won't miss them. The gist of the recipe is this:
Cook dried beans according to package directions. (We used a pressure cooker this year to pre-cook the beans and it worked amazingly well.) Once your beans are soft, add one chopped onion and a clove or two of chopped garlic to the pot. Add or subtract liquid as you like, depending on how soupy you want the final product to be. Add salt and pepper to taste. (Usually, the more pepper the better.) Make sure your beans are soft before adding the onion. Something about the chemistry of the onion will prevent the beans from softening if they aren't already cooked. I'm sure this is Google-able, as I don't know the exact science behind it, but I've seen it happen in person.
While the beans are cooking, rinse your collards and tear them into bite sized pieces. Put them in a pot (they'll cook way down) with a little bit of water - I usually just use whatever water is left on them from rinsing, plus another splash for good measure. You don't want a ton of water in there, just enough to steam (you don't want to have to pour off a lot of excess water, thereby losing all the nutrients from the cooked greens). Steam the collards until they start to wilt. Once they've cooked down a bit, add a splash of vinegar, a smidge of sugar, salt, pepper and a clove or two of chopped garlic if you like garlic. Now, there are two schools of thought on collards. The "old school" way is to let the collards cook as long as the beans. Collards can be tough and stringy, so I guess cooking the shit out of them makes them tender? The other school of thought is to cook them until they turn bright green, which doesn't take very long. If you go for the first method, the size of the pieces doesn't really matter. If you go for the second, I'd recommend smaller sized pieces. I usually end up somewhere in the middle. I think the take-away lesson is that you can't really overcook them. Just keep an eye out that they don't scorch to the bottom of the pot.
Now, the final touch on this meal is the cornbread. You can make any old cornbread you want to go with the beans and greens. Cornbread is delicious anyway, but when used to sop up the bean liquor, well... It's just heavenly. My favorite cornbread recipe is from 101cookbooks.com: Firecracker Cornbread. I've never made the vegetarian version, but veganizing the recipe is super easy. Instead of buttermilk, I use 1 cup of almond (or soy) milk plus 1 tsp. of cider vinegar. Instead of an egg I use 1/4 cup of soy yogurt. You can likely use 1/4 cup of applesauce instead of yogurt - you just need a binder. I also just put a few tablespoons of margarine plus a few teaspoons of red pepper flakes directly in the baking pan and pop that into the oven while I combine the ingredients. Then swirl it around the pan a bit before pouring the batter in. You can easily customize this cornbread. I've kicked it up even further by adding a minced jalapeno, but you could go the other direction by omitting the red pepper flakes and adding blueberries or some such to the mix. You'll never go back to packaged cornbread mix once you've made this. Super easy and so tasty!
When serving, you can mix the collards and black-eyed peas into more of a stew, or you can just put a serving of collards right on top of your beans. Make sure to have hot sauce on the table. Black-eyed peas and collards just aren't complete without the hot sauce.
Happy New Year! Luck and prosperity to you all!
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