Hoppin' John

PanNan's Note:

A creole version of this Southern favorite. A must for New Year's Day, but we love it year round.

• Total Time: 2 hrs 15 mins
• Prep Time: 15 mins
• Cook Time: 2 hrs

Ingredients:

Servings: 6

• 1 cup uncooked rice
• ½ cup water
• 1 ½ cups tomato juice
• 1 package grated pimento cheese
• 1 medium sweet onion , chopped
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon celery salt
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• ¼ teaspoon Tabasco sauce
• ¼ cup butter , cut in pieces (or use 1/4 cup bacon drippings)
• 3 -4 slices of cooked crumbled bacon
• 1 (15 ounce) can black-eyed peas , undrained
• parsley
• pimentos

Directions:

1. Mix all ingredients before the bacon.
2. Pour into a 2 qrt buttered casserole with cover.
3. Bake at 350, tightly covered, for 1 1/2 hours.
4. Uncover, stir and toss lightly with blackeyed peas; cover and bake 30 more minutes.
5. Garnish with bacon, parsley and pimento.

Reviews

[daquirigoddess]

The only substitution I made was a can of Rotel tomatoes instead of the tomato juice. This is my new black eyed pea recipe for New Year's Day.

[rosslare]

Very good rice dish, made it as instructed. I don't know, how much is a package of pimento cheese, but I used 5oz of processed pimento cheese and that seemed to be fine. I also added little more salt and tabasco. Yum!

[Kumquat the Cat's friend]

This was quite an excellent and tasty rice and bean dish. I omitted the butter and had to use black beans instead of the black-eyed peas because my store didn't have any canned. I don't think this affected the taste much (although I've never tried this dish before). Also, I used V-8 juice instead of tomato because that's what I had on hand and imitation bacon strips (Morningstar Farms) to reduce fat further and make it vegetarian-friendly. (Excellent one-dish meal, by the way.) I noticed that what distinguishes this hoppin' john dish from others was the cheese. However, I am not familiar with pimento cheese so I used monterey jack and jarred pimentos. Next time I might try this with pepper jack as I really like the heat. This time I sprinkled liberally with hot sauce (and, believe it or not even more salt) when serving. Taste was very complex even without extra heat and salt - I really loved it! Thanks much for this great recipe!