Is it just me, or does 2014 still sound like something that should be far away, not something we’re already in the second day of? I guess it just takes some getting used to saying and writing a new year.
I hope the new year is treating all of you well, and that your celebrations were fun and safe. We’re pretty low key here in Sweet Tea Land (at least our little corner of it), so we stayed home, made breakfast for dinner (this fabulous pumpkin spice oatmeal), and watched lots of movies.
On New Year’s Day we made what has become our traditional dinner: collard greens, black-eyed peas, cornbread, and meatloaf. I know, being a southern girl, you’d expect me to have fatback, but we’re weird about pork in our house. And hubby was raised by Yankees. So we’ve just crafted our own New Year’s Day feast. You can read about the traditional one here, it’s kind of neat how some of these things got started.
The short version is that the collard greens are for wealth, the black-eyed peas for luck, and the fatback for health. That last part just really amuses me. People give you the stink eye for eating bacon because it’s “bad”, apparently fatback is “worse” than bacon, but on New Year’s Day it leads to health in the new year. Maybe I’m just easily amused, but it kind of cracks me up.
We substitute the meatloaf largely because it goes so well with collard greens and black eyed peas, which we love. And you really can’t go wrong with cornbread. Hopefully the meatloaf works, and we’re all set for a lucky, healthy, and wealthy new year. What is your traditional New Year’s Day meal?
