We love dry beans and peas . . except I can hardly look at black eyed peas. The one way I can eat them is in a cold black eyed pea salad and I don’t LOVE that . . it’s just not as bad as regular black eyed peas. Yesterday I had been thinking all day that I HAVE to eat black eyed peas tomorrow. A spoonful will be sufficient but really, I don’t even like how they smell cooking.
Last night I was watching youtube and The Salted Pepper had a new recipe for Black Eyed Pea Chili. I had pretty much everything I needed to make the recipe. I didn’t have the dried ancho pepper but I had dried guajillo peppers so I used one of those. There were two large packages of chicken thighs in the freezer but they had bones and skin. No big deal. I can deal with that. This morning I grabbed one package of the thighs and put them in a tub of cold water. I needed them to defrost enough that I could break them apart. I finally got 5 separated from the other 5. All were still frozen close to solid so I vacuum sealed the remaining 5 and stuck them back in the freezer. It was easy to remove the skin and I left the bones in and knew I could fish out the bones after the dish was cooked. Louise at The Salted Pepper said it didn’t matter if you used frozen thighs, or even if they were in one big glob. It’s all cooked in the pressure cooker. She uses the Ninja Foodi but an Instant Pot or even a stovetop pressure cooker will work.
It was delicious and totally changed my opinion of black eyed peas. Even Vince said “Don’t lose this recipe. It’s great!”
And, I didn’t break down the food cost but it has to be an inexpensive meal. We had it with a bit of coleslaw so we had our black eyed peas and cabbage. Vince had bacon for breakfast . . no pork for me today. I even dipped my soup out before adding the cream cheese and cream.
There was enough that I put some in the fridge and some in the freezer so for four chicken thighs, we should get at least three meals. One pot meal. Inexpensive. Quick to fix. Lots of leftovers. What’s not to love?