Southern peas are picked when the shells become plimp but well before they dry. You usually do get a few that will become snaps. As recommended previously, cook with either ham, ham hocks, smoked bacon, fatback, or preferably salt pork or country ham. Salt and cook with water until done. They are great with fresh sliced tomatoes, fried green tomatoes, fried chicken, pork chops or ham with raw onion cut up in them or with stewed tomatoes and rice along with a piece of cornbread and fresh cream still corn washed down with tons of really sweet tea or leamonade or moonshine with coke. Oh how I miss sitting down with my parents and siblings and eating this. We also sometimes put fresh young okra pods in with the peas near the time they are about done and suck those slick tasty pods down our gullets. Oh the good old days. Linda

Rita, what a dilemma! I hate it when you think you've finally found a product you can use without any trepidation, and then the grocery store changes brands, suppliers or, even worse, discontinues it. I hope you can find another source for just, plain pork. Gina, I'm with you! That "lower sodium" label can be so deceiving. I saw a lower sodium version of a Top Ramen type soup. Sure, it was about 25% less sodium than the regular stuff. But even so, it was still hideously high in sodium content. I can't use the Swanson lower sodium chicken broth because it's still too full of salt for me to comfortably use. Yet the Pacific and Trader Joe's lower sodium chicken broth cartons are perfect for someone on a restricted salt diet.

"Southern Peas" are actually a bean, not a pea. They are in the bean side of the legume family Vigna unguiculata. They are more dense than peas so they need to be canned as Shelled Beans (like Limas). The process is basically the same for pints but longer processing is needed for quarts and the instructions are a bit different. It is especially true for ones like the speckled varieties as they fall into the "baked" bean part of the family. So you didn't like Christmas you probably won't like Dixie either. Zipper (don't know Elite) is more like Black Eye and Purple Hull and should be fine. But IME experience they all lose a lot of that fresh flavor when canned unless spiced up a great deal. That's why we generally prefer them dried on the vine and then canned as that drying intensifies their flavor. If I can them green I add things like onion powder, Italian seasoning, or cajun seasonings to taste when canning. Dave

I almost never use any salt while cooking, with the exception of when I make gazpacho or cold cucumber yogurt soup. I will use concentrated chicken stock in some recipes, or soy sauce, or salted butter, but will virtually never add any salt directly. I'm often both amused and annoyed by cooking shows where at every single step of the recipe they add more and more salt. I'm annoyed because if you add too little salt for the tastes of the person eating the remedy is simple, they can add some at the table, however if the cook adds too much there is no way to make it less salty, the most that can be managed is to add something else to try to hide the fact that it is too salty. A friend from work participated in a nutritional study, where they provide all of your food for two weeks. One week contains zero salt. The second week has very similar foods, but with very high salt. While he was heating his lunch at work I could tell from 5 feet away it was the high-salt week. When he finished the study, his results were so anomalous, that they questioned him about whether he followed the instructions and asked him to do two more weeks. The second test produced the same anomalous results, for him the high-salt diet actually reduced his blood pressure.