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New Year old school southern cooking

New Year's Day is approaching, which means we need to have a little talk about Hoppin' John. A savory blend of rice and black-eyed peas, it's served alongside collard greens as the traditional New Year's Day meal in the South and, increasingly, in other parts of the country. Eating those two dishes will ensure prosperity in the new year, and the collards represent greenbacks and the black-eyed peas coins. Or so they say. For a long time, if offered a plate of collards and Hoppin' John on New Years, I would have been inclined to say, "keep the change," for...

So the Super Bowl came and went like a fat, sweaty, overbearing relative – and it left a stench in the bathroom that can only be described as the Black Eyed Peas. Yes – once again we are suffocated by the American assumption that what is lapped up by teenage girls is also lapped up by everyone else over fourteen. This scares the Bieber out of me. Because it’s true. We are what we eat. And last night we ate a pile of crap. Don’t get me wrong. The Peas aren’t that awful. Beneath the autotune, the plastic surgery, the...

On second thought, maybe Usher should have been the headliner for the Super Bowl halftime show. The superstar had only a brief cameo in the showcase, but his tightly choreographed moves and acrobatics marked the brief exhilarating moment of a surprisingly stale medley from the normally frenetic headliners, the Black Eyed Peas. The Super Bowl performance was arguably the biggest stage yet for the quirky quartet, whose fusion of pop, dance and hip-hop have made them global superstars. But in the massive Cowboys Arena, the group appeared to be as stiff as frontman will.i.am's plastic hair hat.

Y'all The drive by truckers had a song (never gonna change) that went... Daddy used to empty out his shotgun shells, Fill 'em fulla black eyed peas. Aim real low at your feet and your ankles, And rip right through your knees Does anybody have any first hand experience with loading shotgun shells with black eyed peas? How about loading shotgun shells with rock salt? What kind of rock salt do you use? What is the effective radius of a rock salt load? Anybody ever used black eyed peas, pinto beans, anything like that for a .12 ga load? I...

Whether you eat them for luck or just because they taste good (and good for you!), here's an easy recipe to round out your New Year's Day dinner.

Perez Hilton and Black Eyed Peas singer Will.I.Am have posted video statements giving two very different accounts of an alleged assault of the gossip blogger outside a nightclub early Monday morning. Perez Hilton Twittered that he was bleeding after being assaulted by a member of the Black Eyed Peas outside a party at the club Cobra following the MuchMusic Video Awards in Toronto, Canada on Sunday night.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Just call him The Duke. Actor Josh Duhamel and his girlfriend, Fergie, are engaged, his publicist said Wednesday. -snip- Duhamel, 35, told Best Life magazine in a recent interview that he's been dating 32-year-old Fergie for about three years and that they have bought a house together. Duhamel is the star of NBC's "Las Vegas," and appeared in the action movie "Transformers." -snip-