Jae and I decided to have the traditional Southern good luck dinner for New Year’s Day — collard greens, black-eyed peas and cornbread. The greens supposedly represent cash, the folding kind, the peas coins, and the cornbread gold. Quite apart from that it’s a damned good meal, as basic as you can get but as likely to be eaten by princes as by paupers down in Dixie.
It certainly took me back to my childhood.
Jae did all the work. He steamed the greens until they were tender then sauteed them in olive oil with garlic, shallots and lemon juice, adding a dollop of butter to the skillet at the end. They were perfect and we ate them so quickly and completely that they couldn’t make the group portrait above.
He boiled the black-eyed peas in vegetable stock with garlic and shallots, and he made a superb cornbread round in my cast-iron skillet in the oven.
I’m starting to feel lucky already.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Sounds super good–and super good luck! Surprised you don’t cook your collards with a ham hock. I guess it has no likeness to riches and “hock” has bad-luck association with pawn shops. Plus it takes hours to cook ’em up right and strips all the food value out of the greens,
Jae wanted to go vegetarian as much as possible. He made a batch of peas with country ham in them for me but it wasn’t ready by dinner time. I’ll be dining on them all next week.
Follow up — Jae went out today and played craps, won $200. Oh, those collard greens!