Monday, February 20, 2017

Lunch & Dinner, Feb 20

Today I realized I hadn't left the house since last Monday when I came down with that head cold. So we decided to go for a drive to check out the damage from Friday's storm. Omg! As if the Cajon Valley hadn't suffered enough from the Blue Cut fire this summer, the valley was practically scoured from flood waters! We could see where they'd had to plow mucho mounds of mud off of the road so that traffic could get through.  Repair crews were out to fix the interstate where it had collapsed. 

While out, we decided to stop at McDonald's for lunch. I had their Chicken Bacon Ranch salad with grilled chicken. 

 

Not bad, but not awesome. I think the salads at Wendy's are better, but that's faint praise, indeed. 

On to dinner:

The Lady Cream peas I've been sprouting this week are not peas in the sense of English green peas. They are instead a variety of African beans brought to the US during the slave trade known as cowpeas or Southern peas and are varieties of the same species that includes black eyed peas and purple hull peas. You can read more about them here:


So for dinner tonight I did a variation on a traditional Southern field pea dish, the basics of which I found here:


My variations included adding 2 medium carrots after the bacon, onions, and garlic had cooked down, plus 1/2 cup of store-bought vegetable broth. After letting that cook until the carrots were tender, I added the rest of my lentils and mung bean sprouts in with the Lady Cream peas, plus another 1/2 cup of vegetable broth, which used that up. 

 

Since my beans were already tender from sprouting, I didn't have to cook them for an hour and a half, only about 5 minutes or so. That's another benefit to soaking the peas for 48 hours or more: drastically reduced cooking time!

Finally, I added some beet greens to the pot and let them steam for 2 minutes before stirring them in and seasoning with fresh ground salt and pepper. I topped each bowl with some fresh grated pecorino Romano cheese. 

 

Soooo good! I definitely think this will be a permanent part of my dinner repertoire!

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