The final recipe I made from our December #VegCookbookClub book was, appropriately enough, Hoppin' John. Hoppin' John is a dish featuring black eyed peas that is traditionally cooked on New Year's Day in the American South.
I think that the increased interest in both plant-based diets and in artisanal cooking approaches (e.g. preserving, canning, etc.) and the advent of food blogging has prompted the tradition of cooking with black eyed peas to spread beyond the South.
I now know folks from every part of the country who make a specific effort to cook something that incorporates this tradition during the New Year.
The recipe from Vegan Holiday Kitchen is a beans, rice and vegan sausage hot dish with tomatoes and spices galore.
I didn't think through the recipe carefully enough and used vegan chorizo (Soyrizo brand), instead of the actual vegan Field Harvest brand sausage I also had in the fridge. This doesn't matter much from a taste perspective...I like the spiciness of the chorizo...but it matters from a presentation perspective. The dish is designed to have browned *slices* of sausage in it (to emulate the hamhock or pork sausage that the traditional recipes may call for).
Instead, the chorizo really doesn't hold together into slices very well, even after trying to brown them on their own before mixing them into everything else. So it really resembles ground "meat" more than providing the chewy texture and mouthfeel of sausage.
I liked it and ate it for three days without complaint (as did my omnivorous S.O.) but lesson learned nonetheless.
And here's what it looked like in the skillet. You can see it would look quite different indeed if the sausage were slices, not ground up.
Happy New Year...from me and my Hoppin John :)
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