On New Year’s day (the other New Year), my husband and daughter came home from the grocery store and tossed a bag of black-eyed peas onto to counter.

“You always eat black-eye peas on New Year’s day,” he says.

“We’ll yes I do, but I’m generally not the one who cooks the black-eyed peas that I eat,” I respond back.

Time to find a recipe for black-eyed peas.

I browsed several options before selecting Slow cooker spicy black-eyed peas from Allrecipes.com.

I had to tweak the dish a bit to “kosherize” it but the switches were simple:

Ingredients:

• 6 cups water
• 1 cube chicken bouillon
• 1 pound dried black-eyed peas, sorted and rinsed (I soaked mine overnight because I wasn’t sure how I was going to cook them)
• 1 onion, diced
• 2 cloves garlic, diced
• 1 red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded, and diced
• 1 jalapeno chile, seeded and minced (I skipped the heat because we are not lovers of super spicy food)
• Jacks Gourmet sweet Italian sausage (2 links chopped into small pieces)
• 8 ounces diced ham
• 4 slices bacon, chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1 1/2 teaspoons cumin
• Salt to taste
• 1 teaspoon ground black pepper

Pour the water into a slow cooker, add the bouillon cube and stir to dissolve. Combine the black-eyed peas, onion, garlic, bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, Kosher sausage, cayenne pepper, cumin, sale, and pepper to blend. Cover the slow cooker and cook on low for 6 to 8 hours until the beans are tender.

I also made cornbread, of course, to go with the black-eye peas. I am from the South after all. I felt so lucky to find a cornbread mix at WalMart that was OU Kosher pareve – Fleischmann’s Simply Homemade baking mix.

Follow the instructions on the box and substitute 2/3 cup pareve soy milk for the real milk and use pareve margarine instead of butter. The cornbread was delicious and a perfect combo with the spicy black-eyed peas.

Happy New Year and Happy Kosher Treif Cooking!