I hope everybody had their black eye'd peas, hog jowls, cabbage, and cornbread for luck! Happy New Year!
Yep! Well, my recipe for Hoppin' John is a little different, but that's the stuff! Haven't missed making it for close to 50 years. Black eye peas, rice, a pound of bacon, an onion sliced and sauteed in a cube of butter, couple of dry red peppers and salt. My wife's a New Englander, and all the fat makes her eyes cross. I tried to explain that's for the ease of life, but she's still looking leery. Black eyes and greens is her background.
I almost struck out this year, though. New Years snuck up on me and I hadn't got the black eyes. I knew better than to look for them close by (knew lots of folks around here would be making up a batch. So I went to the Safeway store in a more Yankee neighborhood. There was a big empty space where the dried black eye peas used to be. One of the clerks looked in the back and said they were out, but they would have some *tomorrow.* I told him I had to be cooking them in a half hour, and he looked really perplexed. But I found some frozen black eyes and the day was saved.
Never used to have a problem finding black eyed peas, but this is the second time I've found the shelves of a store empty!
How many of us have this tradition? I always thought it was a Southern thing, but the Yankee store was empty...
