New Year's Preparations

Forgive us, again. We forgot to post yesterday, so think of this as yesterday's post.

Being good Southerners, my family has a food-related superstition, I mean, tradition for New Year's Day. We eat turnip greens and black-eyed peas. As I learned it, the turnip greens are for money, and the black-eyed peas are for luck. (Similar traditions I've heard of involve collard greens or cabbage for the greens.)

My grandmother used to make the turnip greens in the good Southern way of boiling them to death (probably about 8 hours or so) with some slab of pork product in the pot. The black-eyed peas got a similar treatment, though they weren't cooked for as long.

I choose to make my greens and peas vegetarian, both for the health benefits and because we have vegetarian friends that have joined us for past New Year's Day dinners. I add olive oil and dried mushrooms to the greens (and usually don't cook them quite as long, but still a long time), and olive oil, dried mushrooms, onions, and tomatoes to the peas (which I cook in the crock-pot). Unfortunately, I can't find my recipes that I created over the past few years so I'll be winging it on New Year's.

To prepare for the dinner, the first step is purchasing the ingredients. Whole Foods didn't have turnip greens, only collards, so I went to Central Market in the hopes they had some. Jackpot!


I got plenty of looks walking around the grocery store with that pile of greens (don't worry, they cook down a lot when you boil them for a few hours), and the cashier asked me what I was making with all the turnip greens. Uh, turnip greens.

To make room in the fridge, I took the stems off the greens and ended up with two produce bags stuffed with torn leaves.


I know we'll have lots of leftovers of the greens, regardless of how many people join us for dinner, because none of our friends are as fond of them as I am. But as with money, I'd rather have too much than not enough!

Happy almost-New-Year!