published: Wednesday, October 03, 2012

Black-eyed peas

Hi, all. Hope your week is going well. We are now serving our new menu in our Café as well as in patient services. It is going over pretty well. We are serving lighter lunches like entrée salads with a cup of soup, then we offer you a sensible hot entrée at dinner time.

For our patients, today at lunch we are serving cream of mushroom soup and grilled chicken Caesar wrap and for dinner serving roast turkey breast with whipped red potatoes, fresh green beans and a mini red velvet Bundt cake for dessert.

The menu also offers a vegetarian option on every diet for all three meals every day. Today's vegetarian option for dinner is a Santa Fe salad, which has roasted corn and black beans tossed into romaine and finished with a cilantro vinaigrette.

The new fall/winter menu in our Café is full of new dishes that we are excited to offer to our guests. Today in the Café, we are serving cod picatta with artichoke, capers and fresh spinach topped with a light lemon butter sauce. Or, if you prefer vegetarian, we have broccoli pasta carbonara with vegetable bacon.

In just a few weeks, our Café will be remodeled and we will be able to offer even more variety to the public. There has even been some talk about some sushi like what you might find at a supermarket.

This week, I just made an old recipe I had for black eyed pea soup and thought you might like to try it. This is a very easy recipe and would be a good one to serve on the upcoming New Year. You could even change the level of liquid in the dish and use it as a side of black eyed peas instead of making it into a soup.

My email address is listed at the bottom of every column that I write, so I invite feedback and would try and help anyone with any culinary questions they might have.

Cheers, Chef.

Black-eyed peas

2 lbs. dried Black eye peas (soaked in Water overnight in the walk-in)

2 diced large white onions

3 oz. minced garlic

1.5 lbs. Oregano

1/2 oz. cayenne

1 gallon of chicken stock

1 10-pound can of tomatoes

3 oz. of cooking oil

In a large soup pot, heat oil and sauté onions and garlic until tender (about 8 minutes) then add stock and peas. Simmer for about 20 minutes then add tomatoes, cayenne and oregano. Cook for another 20 minutes or until peas are tender. Adjust seasoning with salt and pepper.

Tim Spain is System Executive Chef with Florida Hospital Heartland Medical Center and Morrison Healthcare Food Service. He can be reached at tim.spain@ahss.org/. Guest columns are the opinion of the writer, not necessarily those of the News-Sun staff.