Black-Eyed Pea Burgers
I make a lot of jokes about how thrifty we are, but the truth is, we’re thrifty because we’re poor. This results from a combination of stupid life choices (i.e., going to grad school and signing a binding contract with sociopaths, which, despite how it may appear, were actually two separate bad choices) and really bad luck (i.e., my unfortunate combination of genes and environment). Despite all the ranting about health care we’ve endured over the past few years, few have bothered to point out the irony of a system in which the affordability of your medical care depends on your ability to work.* Now that I am no longer in the peak physical condition necessary to trip over myself and shatter chalk in front of roomfuls of undergraduates, my medication has gone from manageable expense to third most valuable possession, while my income has gone from just barely five figures to “pride in my work.”
I can see the inside of your esophagus!
I am hoping that both my illness and our poverty will be temporary. In the meantime, we eat a lot of beans.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. Supposedly, beans are good for you and vegetarianism is good for the environment. Also, if you eat meat, all naked women will go to jail, or so I gather from PETA ads. Beans come in many different varieties, which makes them amenable to my obsession with ranking foods. When eaten in combination with Tastee-os (yes, we’re so poor that we buy a brand of cereal previously thought to exist only in cartoons), they provide a complete protein. Also, they taste pretty good.
Our latest favorite is the black-eyed pea, which despite the name is actually a bean. At first glance, black-eyed peas are kind of cute, but if you stare at them too long, they become kind of disturbing, especially when you realize that they don’t resemble mortal eyes so much as the Eye of Sauron.
One bean to rule them all.
Like all other beans, they can be prepared in enormous batches, allowing for weirder and weirder experiments as the week goes on.
Here’s one experiment that went particularly well.
It starts with a normal black-eyed pea recipe:
Slow-Cooker Black-Eyed Peas
- 1 lb dry black-eyed peas
- 6 cups broth (I use chicken broth; vegetarians by choice can use vegetable broth)
- 1 onion, diced
- 1 bell pepper, diced
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 tsp pepper
- 1 tsp chili powder
- 1 tbsp ground cumin
- 2 tsp dried oregano
- salt to taste
- people who hate nude women can add a couple slices’ worth of chopped bacon
- Rinse peas and pick out the ones that look like British teeth.
- Dump everything in a slow cooker.
- Cook on high for about 4 hours, stirring occasionally.
Eat the black-eyed peas for a few days. When you get tired of them, try this:
Black-Eyed Pea Burgers
- Leftover black-eyed peas, drained and haphazardly mashed
- 1 slice of stale or toasted bread per cup of peas, crumbled
- olive oil
- raw kale leaves, stems removed, because hippies love kale
- Mix peas and breadcrumbs. Form into patties.
- Heat olive oil and fry patties until browned. Flip (carefully, as these are more fragile than meat patties) and repeat.
- Serve with kale leaves.
*Yes, I’m aware of government programs meant to solve this problem, but those don’t change the fact that the system is fundamentally illogical. On second thought, it could be coldly logical if you have different motives, like ushering in the reign of our future robot overlords.
