I had a bag of Lady Cream Peas from the Camelia Company. Camelia seems to be the company to get these dried peas from.
I had transferred these dry peas to a small canning jar. The Dukes Mayo jar lids (those yellow soft plastic ones) fit the quart canning jar lids, so I am able to store both cooked items (soups) and dry veggies prior to cooking.
So earlier today, I put the peas in a small bowl and added water, salt and baking soda to them. After a few hours I was visually able to tell that the beans had become slightly larger and soaked up some of the liquid. A few hours later I transferred half of the soaked peas to a large cooking pot, added some chicken broth & water, some seasoning meat and started cooking them. *I’ve already added some S&P and garlic, with some margarine also. I plan to add some sauteed onion about 30 minutes into the cooking process.
I can already tell that I am going to like the flavor of these peas. The broth already has good flavor.
I thought I was going to need to cook the peas for over an hour, but about 35 minutes into the cooking time, I tasted one of the peas and it was already soft & tender. So, I sauteed the onion quickly, added it to the peas, and took the peas off the heat. They are now cooling on the stove top.
An extremely soft “melt in your mouth” pea, with a mild flavor. I definitely want to try these peas in other venues, such as my vegetable soup, and maybe with lentils.
NOTE: I decided to only cook half of the soaked peas, so I put the rest, without the soaking liquid into a Tupperware container and placed that in the freezer. I did use the soaking liquid to start soaking some other beans. I think the other beans were some that were left over from the Speckled Butter Beans.
Might be interesting to mix Lady Cream Peas, Yellow Eye and Black Eyed Peas in a single dish. I recall the Yellow Eye Peas had a slight Black Eyed Pea flavor, and I think the Lady Cream Peas do also.
NOTE [11/12/22]: I had some dried green split peas that I soaked for several hours. I also had a large (for my personal use) ham hock that I probably have had for a year or more. This was one of those that I had bought at Food Lion, and I thought it had a bone in it, but when I cut into it, there was no bone. The company had a way of cutting a strip of country ham and placing it over the cut end of the hock. It finally came to me that I had better use this before it went bad.
When I found that there was no bone to cut through, I sliced the ham hock into 3 fairly equal portions, and froze two of them (separately packaged).
I drained the soaking liquid from the green peas, and added some chicken broth to the pot. I sliced the third of the ham hock and put those slices in the pot. I also took out the frozen Lady Cream Peas (that had already been soaked), and put a good portion of them in with the split green peas. But, here was the surprise… I don’t think it took even 45 minutes to completely cook the green split peas & and Lady Cream Peas. I got up to take a look, and saw that the green peas were already breaking down, but the Lady Cream Peas were still intact. The surprise was that stirring the pot broke down most of the green peas, and when I tried a Lady Cream Pea, it was already completely cooked through. It wasn’t hard, or mealy, it was cooked and “melt in your mouth” soft.
See the photos. This pea combination looks “cool” (a word I am using in learning German) and the flavors do go great together.
I just tried some more of these peas and I have to say that I can’t imagine the flavors becoming any better if you refrigerated them overnight (as you do to make exceptional black eyed peas). *Make this! Combine these peas for a really good soup.
It had been a long while since I had made one of these collages.