Happy New Year!

[underused]

I hope everyone had a lovely New Year's Eve. We celebrated in our usual style, which involved hanging out at home with Netflix and junk food. Today, I've got a bit of family coming for lunch, and there's what I hope will be a splendid and hearty Beef Bourguignon simmering in the oven. 

Do you have any New Year's food traditions? Did you make anything particularly impressive over the holidays?

For my part, I attempted a turkey, which I brined, because Martha Stewart. It looked beautiful, but my brine was too salty by half and it kinda wrecked the bird.

Ah, well. They can't all be winners. ☺

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

I spent New Year's Eve at my best friend's house; her spread included barbecued pork ribs, black-eyed peas, garlic-mashed cauliflower, stir-fried spinach, Chinese buffet-style green beans (made by her younger son, who's taken an interest in cooking), and sauerkraut.

(Culinary/Cross-Cultural Fun Fact: many Americans of European and/or African descent have a tradition of serving some sort of greens--most often cabbage or collards--on New Year's as a gesture to invoke prosperity; the greens resemble U.S. paper currency. By a similar token, it's an auspicious Chinese New Year practice to serve green leafy vegetables, the term for which is "choy" (cf. bok choy)--homonymous with the word for "wealth." We therefore have two unrelated cultures, via two unrelated lines of thought and symbolism, arriving at the same New Year's custom for the same reason; I find this inordinately fascinating.)

[underused]

That is very interesting!

Keeping that in mind: although the beef turned out beautifully, the only thing that didn't work that day was our one green offering. Turns out the beans we'd frozen from our summer garden must have been too old as, once cooked, they were completely un-chewable.

If greens on new year's are meant to "invoke prosperity," this seems like an inauspicious sign...