Collards and Black Eyed Pea Soup In The Slow Cooker

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to give an old recipe a BeingAVeganAthlete spin. I did and it was great! The slow cooker made the work easy and the soup that much heartier. Apparently, this is some sort of traditional recipe from the southern United States. Whatever... I've bastardized it enough to allow it to become a traditional recipe of southern Ontario.

Ingredients:

• 2 small or 1 large onion, diced
• 3 sticks of celery, diced
• 1 large red bell pepper, diced
• 5-6 cloves of garlic, very thinly sliced (this is conservative - go 6-10 if you really love food)
• 1 450g bag of dried black eyed peas
• 6 cups of water
• 6 TBSP of vegetable broth powder
• 1 bunch of collard greens, chopped with the stems removed
• 1 TSP each of thyme, cayenne pepper, paprika, black pepper, basil
• 1 16 ounce can of diced or crushed tomatoes
• 1 small tin of tomato paste
• 4 TBSP of extra virgin olive oil

Saute all the veggies (onion, red bell pepper, garlic, celery) in oil until onion is tender, opaque and yellow.

Pour the water into your slow cooker. Add the vegetable broth powder and stir in until dissolved. Put the slow cooker on high and add in black eyed peas, seasoning, tomatoes and tomato paste. Mix everything well and wait for the frying to be complete.

Add the fried mix to the slow cooker and mix in well. Put the collard greens on top and cover the slow cooker. When the greens have softened up, mix well into the soup.

The completion of the soup hinges on the black eyed peas becoming tender enough to be enjoyable to eat. Leave on high for 5-6 hours. You can probably get away with consuming some of the soup at this point but you're better off reducing the heat to low and letting cook overnight.

This soup is hearty enough for biggest meat-eating savage to believe that it's healthy. Healthy it is. This soup is packed with protein, most of your essential vitamins and is basically an anti-oxidant bomb.

Enjoy and Happy New Year to all! Remember to make sure your beer and wine are from a vegan-friendly source then drink to your heart's content.

My Associated Content version of the recipe can be viewed here.

Smith's A Victim Of The Media Monster

Recently, we were media bombed with a story out of Australia where a potato chip company was supposedly about to introduce a new kangaroo and emu flavoured potato chip. This caused an uproar, not only among vegans and vegetarians, but with Australian patriots as well. You see, they felt that it was an insult because a) people would be eating their coat of arms and b) it would be teaching kids that it was fun to go out and kill these animals that so much represented Australia on the international scene. The company in question is Smith's.

As is the case with many stories in the media, this one was missing most of the facts and was meant as a great filler at a slow news time. The suggested flavour was one of four finalists in a contest open to the public to name the company's next potato chip. The company insists that all the flavouring would have been artificial and no kangaroos or emus would have died in the making of this potential new flavour. Being Canadian and vegan, I have no idea what that would have tasted like. My guess is that it would have been just another salt coated potato chip soaked in some sort of cooking oil.

It was very recently announced that Caesar's Salad was the winning flavour. This, of course, will taste like sour cream and onion or all-dressed or salt and vinegar or whatever - they all taste the same in the end. Whether this was a legitimate win - the contest was voted on through their website - or a great public relations fix, there will be no kangaroo and emu chips in Australia unless manufactured by someone other than Smith's.

My guess, after all the international bad press, is that Smith's fixed the vote in favour of any flavour but the kangaroo and emu. Smith's is obviously not affiliated with the Canadian government - the ones who pass legislation despite the unanimous opposition from the majority of the citizens (HST for example).

I was about to write about this when the issue first appeared. I'm glad I didn't. What lesson has been learned? When the media goes viral with a story, did deep to find out the real facts. Shock and awe sell news. Shock and awe are very rarely part of our real world lives.

In other news...

I'm working with a vegan soup recipe I found online at the internet home of the Denver Post. The recipe is meant to be relatively quick and suggests using a pressure cooker or a stovetop pot. I'm making this into a crockpot recipe. Other than the cooking style, however, I'm surprisingly not going to mess with the ingredients much - so unlike me.

Pressure cookers!? So American - always in such a hurry!

Here's the link to the original article at the Denver Post. Stayed tuned to find out how my conversion went.