A few folks messaged me on Twitter to ask about my assertion that “round foods are lucky for New Year’s.” All right, all right. I was slightly extrapolating there. There are lots of articles online about NYE food superstitions, and many of them link round or green foods to wealth in the new year. Do they specifically mention pancakes? Not yet. 🙂
One thing that many of the articles mention is the American Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas, greens, and pork for the new year. The most famous preparation of this is Hoppin’ John, which is basically peas (which aren’t really peas anyway, but go with it), bacon, and rice. I grew up in Indiana though, and I never knew about this lucky tradition until a few years back. Northern Indiana’s got lots of Germanic folks and Amish, who don’t go in for such superstitious nonsense, I guess.
That said – if there’s one thing I love, it’s a food-based holiday occasion. (Remember when we made a haggis? And a turducken? And a giant Tim Tam? Good times.) So as soon as I heard about this tradition, I was all in. My go-to recipe for the last few years has been this: Hearty One-Pot Black-Eyed Pea Stew With Kale and Andouille Recipe. This is so, so tasty, and it’s not very hard to make* either. (You don’t need to soak the peas or use a pressure cooker or anything like that.) This year I even upped the ante by making my own chicken stock earlier in the day!
Here’s what it ended up looking like. I highly recommend you bookmark this one for next New Year’s Day!
* I’ve never been able to find andouille in Sydney, so I just get whatever smoked pork sausage I can find. This year it was a very nice smoked chorizo! I also leave out the green pepper, as the Snook doesn’t care for it.