Another “vegetable” dish from this very flavorful cookbook. I substituted chorizo for the Linguiça, which sounds less spicy. The recipe actually suggests chouriço as a substitute, which is a Portuguese sausage that is similar to chorizo. There’s 6 oz of very flavorful meat in this recipe for a pound of frozen peas – not insignificant. The chorizo is used to flavor olive oil at high heat, which in turn flavors the other components of the dish.

For some reason I have rarely (if ever) cooked with sausage. I normally like to make my ingredients from scratch, and sausage skirts the line of something that can be made at home. This recipe will change my practices – it is clearly worth using a potent sausage like chorizo as a cooking ingredient. The resulting flavor was unique – smokey, but also a bit earthy/gamey/leathery. This is not a flavor that can be readily achieved through just spices and uncured meat.

Several eggs are poached in the peas before serving. I served the peas on top of a light serving of plain white rice. I would recommend this. As I mentioned, the flavor was deep, smokey, and meaty. With the rice, this definitely stands alone as a course or meal. Using this as a side to another meat dish would be very decadent; I think it would be important to make sure there isn’t too much overlap in the smokey cured-meat flavor. I couldn’t help but have seconds and ended up feeling surprisingly full (more so than a calorie count of the ingredients would have suggested.) These peas set a pretty high bar for the cookbook and I’m excited to make more recipes!

Cooking Notes: Don’t go light on salt; by the time you season, most of the salt will have left the meats, so you don’t need to account for that. A tsp is probably good (but go by taste.) The cooking can use a notch or two higher heat than suggested to good results (note I was using cast iron.)

Joe’s Rating: 7.5
Difficulty: 4.5