The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern_ Knockout Dishes With Down-Home Flavor - Matt Lee [45]
5 Uncover the dish, sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top, and place the dish on the top oven rack. Bake for 8 minutes, or until the cheese is bubbly and gently browned on top. Serve immediately.
TOASTED RICE AND PEAS “HOPPIN’ JOHN”
serves 4 • TIME: 20 minutes
This shorthand Hoppin’ John is our ultimate weeknight convenience meal or side dish, whipped up from ingredients we almost always have on hand: basmati rice and frozen peas. What makes this recipe sing a more interesting tune (and what justifies our serving it to guests on occasion) is the first step: sautéing the rice in the pot with a little bit of oil to bring out an interesting toasty, popcorn-like flavor; the liquid is added only after the rice has been altered in this fashion. If you haven’t tried it yet, you may discover yourself using this little trick every time you prepare a pot of rice. At first it may appear as crazy to you as it did to us when as little kids we noticed Mom heating rice in what appeared to be a dry pot.
What we later discovered, by reading Karen Hess and other food historians, is that the roots of this technique (and the tradition of cooking pieces of protein together with the rice in the pot) can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia. The path Hoppin’ John most likely took to the American Southeast runs, across many centuries, through northern Africa, where the dish married rice with various types of beans. In the South Carolina Lowcountry, traditional twentieth-century Hoppin’ John marries white rice with some variety of field pea, like black-eyed peas, cowpeas, or purple-hull peas, all of which are actually small beans.
We ponder this hallowed tradition as we unceremoniously dump a brick of frozen California-grown “English peas” (our legume of choice in this instance) into the intensely aromatic Southeast Asian rice variety called basmati (Louisiana-grown), and feel a bit sneaky. Hey, any way you slice it, rice and legumes are a great source of protein and terrific flavors.
What seems particularly illicit about our recipe is its efficiency: the peas cook in the pot of hot cooked rice during that extra 5 minutes that we always seem to need before dishing up—to assemble plates and cutlery, pour wine into glasses, and to rip off a few paper towel “napkins.”
One 10-ounce package frozen English (garden) peas
1 tablespoon bacon fat or olive oil
1 cup basmati rice (do not rinse)
½ teaspoon crushed dried red chile flakes (optional)
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, preferably a fancy finishing one (see Notes on Finishing)
½ teaspoon flaky finishing salt, such as Maldon, or more to taste (see Notes on Finishing)
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 Remove the peas from the freezer.
2 Set a heavy 2-quart saucepan over medium-high heat for 1 minute; then add the bacon fat or olive oil and heat it for 1 minute. Add the rice, stirring it with a wooden spoon until the grains are all coated and shiny. Toast the rice, stirring it only occasionally, for 2 minutes, by which time a toasty popcorn aroma should be issuing from the pot (feel free to toast a minute longer if you wish).
3 Add 2 cups water and stir to evenly distribute the rice in the water. Once the water is simmering, turn the heat down to low, and cover the pan with the lid just slightly ajar for steam to escape. Simmer the rice for exactly 10 minutes.
4 Remove the pan from the heat and add the frozen peas and chile flakes, stirring to incorporate and breaking up any large clumps of peas. Cover the pan tightly, and allow it to sit for a full 5 minutes, off the heat, without peeking.
5 Add the olive oil, salt, and pepper, and stir