After weeks of travel and holiday eating, I’m ready to be home. Granted my family and friends make many wonderful and flavorful accommodations for us while visiting, but it’s nice to be home and eating normal again. No more cookies or hot chocolate mid-afternoon. By this time of year I’m just done, completely saturated from the holidays and ready for some clean livin’. So what are we waiting for?! Let’s get started! Something warm, something delicious and something that will leave us with some leftovers for the work week. Eeek, the work week! And even better, something authentically new year and just maybe, fortuitous. Nothing wrong with starting off the year with a little luck.
My mother always insisted on the traditional black-eyed peas for New Year’s Day. Non-negotiable. Heaven forbid we got off on the wrong foot the first day of the year. Regardless of the New Year’s phone call from my mother checking to see if I had in fact prepared my lucky pot of black-eyed peas, I dutifully skipped this tradition as I have never been able to come to terms with anything that involved a hock. Gross, right? This year, though, things are going to be different. The clouds will part, the sun will shine, lady luck will be in my corner — we’re making a vegan black-eyed peas recipe worthy of ringing in the new year. A little skillet cornbread and some simple-but-brilliant wilted chard with onion, and you’ll be ready to share in the luck yourself.
And just a little trivia for you: black-eyed peas really aren’t peas at all, they’re in fact beans. Shocking, right? So make your beans and stop off for a lottery scratcher on the way home. Might just be your lucky day.
Black-Eyed Peas with Smoked Tofu
Wilted Chard with Onion
Skillet Cornbread
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