Deborama’s Kitchen — New Years Day

Black-eyed Pea Cassoulet (Vegan)

This is what I had for my main meal New Years Day 2021. I soaked the peas all day yesterday in filtered water. Today I started out cooking well after noon, after getting up at 10:00 am, which is better than the last three days. (Better means earlier.)

Thawing homegrown kale for New Years Day greens, a couple of days before.

I’ll get into the actual recipe and the three step cooking process in a bit, but first a little digression about NYD traditions. I mentioned in an earlier post about the black-eyed pea tradition, and it is also a tradition that cooked greens of some kind be eaten on the day. My first husband, a white southerner of antebellum rural tradition, said that the peas represent pennies, and the greens dollar bills. It’s not an actual one-to-one, but generally the more of both you stuff down your gullet, the more money in general you’ll earn, win, or otherwise attain in the coming year.

(And I was today years old (68) before I knew about the laundry thing. Apparently, if you do laundry on New Years Day, you are “washing” some unspecified loved one out of your life. Ouch. Most folklore is not that brutal. )

I was planning to have garlicky stir-fried kale as a side dish to my New Years Day Cassoulet made with black-eyed peas, but…