Spicy Vegan Black-Eyed Peas

Black-Eyed Peas

I hosted bookclub this month.  Since its Black History Month, I choose The Black History of the White House by Clarence Lusane. While our critique of the book was that needed better editing and the academic arguments took away from the anecdotes that were amazing stories of American history, the assessment of our food theme, soul food, was that it was delicious.


We have a vegetarian in bookclub and we try to be mindful of our menu to make accommodations. However of the difficult things for me is when you remove meat from a dish to make it vegetarian, the dish can fall flat.  So I find it so very important to find additional sources of umami to compensate for that lack of meat in a dish.

Black-eyed peas are a hallmark of soul food. However, the dish, slowly cooked with ham hocks, is far from vegetarian.  I searched the net for recipes that were slow cooker friendly and vegetarian but I ended up tinkering recipes into my own.

Spicy Vegan Black-Eyed Peas, adapted from Allrecipes' Slow Cooker Spicy Black-Eyed Peas & Food.com's Spicy Vegetarian Black-Eyed Peas

Ingredients:

Some bottles of hot sauce

• 1 lb dried black-eyed peas, sorted and rinsed
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, diced
• 1 red bell pepper, diced
• 1 jalapeno chile, diced (remove the seeds to turn down the heat)
• 1½ tsp cumin
• 1 tsp Creole Seasoning
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• ½ teaspoon cayenne pepper
• salt, to taste
• 4 cps vegetable broth or stock
• 28 oz can crushed tomatoes
• ¼ cup cider vinegar

Directions:

1. Combine all ingredients but the vinegar in the slow cooker and stir to blend. 
2. Cover the slow cooker and cook on Low for 6 to 8 hours until the beans are tender. 
3. Up to 30 minutes before serving add the cider vinegar.
4. Serve with hot sauce.