Hoppin’ John? Who on earth is that?

To be honest, I have no idea who Hoppin’ John is; nor where he comes from; nor why he’s hopping. Maybe he’s a jackrabbit. Jack is a nickname for John; and what do jackrabbits do? They hop!

Whatever the explanation may be, that Hoppin’ John character was famous enough to have a recipe named after him. I found it in the course of reading What Do I Eat Now? (page 151) and thought it looked interesting. Yesterday evening I tried it; taking liberties, of course.

This dish is meant to be layered in a pan, but I don’t have the pan. I mixed it all up in a five-quart pot. I needed that big pot to cook the rice, anyway.

One of the ingredients in the recipe is green bell pepper. I’ve never cared much for bell peppers; especially not the green kind! I substituted chopped celery; and a small amount of red bell pepper. Hoppin’ John also uses red onion. Fortunately that’s my favorite kind of onion.

Raw celery can take quite a bit of chewing, so I cooked the onion and celery with the (canned) black-eyed peas while I was waiting for the rice to cook. The celery still had some crunch in it at the end; that’s fine with me.

When the rice was done, I used my slotted cooking spoon to transfer the legume mix to the pot with the rice; I didn’t want too much liquid in the finished product. This recipe uses some cheese, too; I chopped up about 2.5 ounces of Monterrey Jack cheese and stirred it in. And diced canned tomatoes.

“HJ” is pretty good. I began to think of variations on it right away. I think I need a chest freezer for all this stuff I keep cooking.