Week 28 - 'Murica

When the 'Murica theme week came up on the challenge list, the dishes that immediately popped into my mind were Southern dishes. There is so much variety in American cuisine, but I couldn't resist trying my hand at something so uniquely American and something you can't really find elsewhere in the world. Southern food, soul food, all of that is just so American to me. For our Southern dinner, I decided on Hoppin' John and collard greens!

The first part of dinner was Hoppin' John. I've been wanting to make Hoppin' John since New Year's (you know, when you're supposed to eat Hoppin' John for good luck), but never got around to it until now. I decided to go with the Pioneer Woman's recipe and followed it pretty closely with only a few adaptations.

I didn't want to go get a smoked ham hock or deal with dried beans (still avoiding them a bit after my last failed experiment with those), so the ingredients I used were:

- 2 tbsp butter ($0.50)

- 1 large onion, diced ($0.79)

- 4 cloves of garlic, minced ($0.10)

- 1 green bell pepper, diced ($0.79)

- 1/2 bunch of celery, chopped ($0.40)

- 2 cans of black-eyed peas ($2)

- 5 cups of chicken broth (see note 4 below) ($2)

- 7 slices of bacon, cut into small pieces ($4.30)

- salt and pepper to taste ($0.05)

- cayenne pepper to taste ($0.05)

- 2 tbsp white vinegar ($0.10)

- 1 tbsp corn starch ($0.05)

The steps to make Hoppin' John were:

1. Melt butter in large pot over medium high heat.

2. Add onion, garlic, green pepper, and celery, and stir. Cook for a few minutes until they are translucent and softening. [Normally the celery is added with the other vegetables, but I added it a few minutes later since I had frozen the celery months ago and it was already pretty softened when it thawed out.]

3. Add the bacon. Continue to stir and cook for a few minutes. Add black-eyed peas.

4. Add chicken broth, salt and pepper, cayenne pepper. [Note: I used too much broth since I used canned beans. I think next time I will do one cup less broth.]

5. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to low, simmer (covered) for 30 minutes.

6. Cook without lid for another 15 minutes or so if it's too watery. After that, if it's still too watery, add cornstarch (mixed with water). [The wateriness was my fault for not reading the directions that carefully about using a little less broth if using canned beans].

7. Add vinegar and adjust seasonings. Allow flavors to meld for a few minutes and then spoon over rice and start eating. (After smelling bacon for an hour, we were so hungry.)

The Hoppin' John was good. I think it might have been better with diced ham, but I wanted to use the same meat for the Hoppin' John and the greens so I went with bacon, which does seem to be acceptable in certain parts of the South. This was really good, but I was expecting it to be more dominated by the beans. Maybe I didn't use enough. As A said, it pretty much tasted like bacon and butter. It was bacon and butter with plenty of vegetables and beans mixed in to make it a little bit more healthy. We would make this again.

The second part of the meal was the Southern Greens. Hoppin' John is often eaten with collard greens, but since the collard greens at Trader Joe's come in a blend of Southern greens, I did that instead. They're Southern greens, after all, so they should work just fine in our very Southern dinner.

I started with this recipe for Kickin' Collard Greens and then made a couple of adaptations, largely from suggestions found in the comments. In the end, I wound up using:

- 6 slices of bacon ($3.69)

- 1 large onion, chopped ($0.79)

- 4 small cloves of garlic, minced ($0.10)

- salt and pepper to taste (about 1 tsp each) ($0.10)

- 3 cups chicken broth ($1.20)

- pinch of red pepper flakes ($0.05)

- 1 lb of Southern greens ($3.49)

- 1 tbsp brown sugar ($0.05)

- 1.5 tbsp apple cider vinegar ($0.20)

Making the greens was really easy. It just takes a long time to simmer for the greens to be tender. The steps were:

1. Cook bacon until crisp. [Since it's going to cook more, you can stop cooking it whenever, in my opinion.] Move to separate plate to cool and then crumble or cut into small pieces.

2. Add onion to the pot with the bacon grease (don't need to add oil). Cook for a few minutes until translucent. Add garlic and cook for 1 minute.

3. Add the greens and allow to cook until they begin to wilt.

4. Add chicken broth. Season with salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, brown sugar, and apple cider vinegar.

5. After boiling, reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until greens are tender (about an hour).

Oh. My. Goodness. When I first tried the greens to test for tenderness, I couldn't believe they could be this tasty. (It was way better than my last Southern greens experiment.) These were some of the best collard greens we've ever eaten, and I certainly didn't expect them to be made in our kitchen. The texture was perfect. The stem pieces were nice and tender, the leaves weren't tough, and none of it was chewy or hard to eat. The bacon gave it a rich, smoky flavor, and there was a little bit of a zing from the red pepper flakes. The sugar and the vinegar mellowed the bitter and peppery flavor that sometimes accompanies these greens, which was nice. In short, this was amazing and so much better than I had been expecting.

As for the cost of our complete dinner, it was about $11.13 for the Hoppin' John, $9.67 for the greens, and maybe $1 for the rice. A total of $21.80 is higher than our usual everyday cooking projects (and more than, say, dinner at Chipotle), but a higher price is probably to be expected when the bacon cost $8 and we used the entire package. But for the amount of food we got (with leftovers), it wasn't a terrible value. After all, we don't eat like this every night (and some nights are much cheaper like the night before's $5 chorizo taco dinner).

Overall, we were really satisfied with this 'Murica challenge dinner. Since eating an entire pack of bacon in one night isn't exactly healthy, I don't think we'll be eating this that regularly (at least not together), but we would definitely make these again. Especially the collard greens. Wow. Those were good.