Purple-hulled pink-eye peas. I could eat them morning, noon and night. This recipe is adapted from one published in Atlanta magazine. The original calls for dried red beans, but it adapts perfectly to fresh field peas of any sort. Duane Nutter is executive chef of One Flew South at the Atlanta airport.
No, that’s not a typo. This week we’ve got a salsa recipe that works with either your watermelon or your field peas. If you’re like me and want to eat your field peas just as field peas this week, then hold onto this recipe if you get to the point you want to do something different with those pretty peas.
The longer this salad sits, the better it tastes, so let it marinate for an hour or more before serving. It’s adapted from a recipe in Saveur magazine.
Crowder peas! Yum. Before I give you a formal recipe, let me just say that my favorite way to fix crowder peas is so simple, and involves those green beans in today’s box as well. Trim and break up the green beans and toss them and the crowder peas in lightly salted water. Boil until…
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This is an adaptation of an African street food dish called Abala. In Senegal, the little packets are wrapped in banana leaves. At one time I had a banana tree in my yard, and could harvest my own banana leaves for wrappers. I used them to make a Burmese dish of steamed sweet rice – yum. But I digress. If you don’t have your own banana tree, there are plenty of banana leaves for sale at the DeKalb Farmers Market in both fresh and frozen form, and probably at any store that caters to a Caribbean or African customer base.
Or – make it simple – use corn husks as I suggest here. Those are pretty ubiquitous these days.
Just reading through the recipe will remind you that many cultures have leaf-wrapped dishes with a starch – like field peas or corn masa – surrounding a savory filling. And the relish here? If this were a recipe from Mexico, we’d be calling it pico de gallo.
Adapted from a recipe published in the New York Times: September 28, 2010.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings.
Now on to the real stars of this week’s box – the field peas.
You can use any southern pea in this recipe, but the cooking time will vary by variety and how mature the peas were when harvested. Our fresh pink-eye peas should cook pretty quickly.
Hands on: 20 minutes
Total time: 40 minutes
Serves: 4
This recipe is from Matt and Ted Lee of The Lee Bros. Charleston Kitchen, author of several terrific Southern cookbooks. Scale down according to the amount of peas in your bag. The recipe was written for butter beans, but will work just fine with your field peas.
About this recipe, they say:
Along with muscadine grapes, butter beans are among the farmer’s market treasures of late summer—reason to wake up with gusto to another day of stultifying heat and oxford-soaking humidity. We do all kinds of things with butter beans: we make a hummus-like spread for the cocktail hour, we simmer them with seasoning meats of all sorts, and we compose marinated salads aplenty. But this may be our most simple treatment yet, and one of the most satisfying.
Butter beans come in many varieties: Some beans are green with purple speckles, some are reddish brown, a few are ivory colored, and there’s a shade of green besides. For this simple side dish, we like to use the small green ones (though you may use frozen baby lima beans if butter beans aren’t in season).
Is there any chance you still have a tomato or two left over from last week’s box? This recipe is from Scott Peacock.
With apologies to those of you who get emails from Whole Foods, this is a recipe that just arrived in my inbox today. “Sweet potatoes, collard greens …. and how about substituting those field peas for the aduki beans called for in the recipe,” I thought. And so, here it is.
