New Year Soup

My offering to you this New Year morning is New Year Soup.  To some of us, the New Year means a fresh start, an opportunity for hope and luck, and for some of us, the New Year means a hangover.  The beauty of this soup is that it covers all the bases.

Every culture has its own food traditions to bring prosperity for the New Year, but all have variations on a common theme:  some kind of cooked greens to bring the promise of financial gain; some kind of legume to bring luck; and some form of pork to bring progress. (I always wondered where this idea came from, so I googled it.  A pig moves forward as it roots around for food, as opposed to a chicken or a lobster that moves backward as it searches for food, so don't eat chicken or lobster on New Year's Day or you risk a reversal in fortune!)

The form these New Year foods take varies from family to family.  Even though I am proud to be a G.R.I.T.S. (Girl Raised in the South for those of you who aren't), my parents were from the Mid-West, so our family traditions combined both traditions.  The usual New Year meal down South contains black-eyed peas, a tradition that came out of the War of Northern Aggression (the Civil War for you Yankees) when the residents of Vicksburg, Mississippi were saved from starving during Grant's siege of the city by eating black-eyed peas.  The typical New Year's Day meal in my momma's kitchen was navy beans (instead of black-eyed peas) cooked with ham hocks and served with spinach and corn bread.  I can still hear Momma saying, "On the farm, we fed black-eyed peas to the cows."  Here in the North, my mother-in-law's meal is sauerkraut cooked with pork and served with mashed potatoes.

My New Year Soup contains ground pork, cabbage, and a can of black-eyed peas.

Of course the other element of New Year's Day is the hangover from New Year's Eve.  

My favorite hangover cure is a greasy breakfast and a Bloody Mary, so my New Year Soup takes care of this as well.  Instead of plain ground pork, I use breakfast sausage, and the liquid base is a large bottle of V-8 juice and a bottle of beer,

seasoned with

So as you can see, this New Year Soup covers all needs:  Prosperity, luck, and a hangover cure all in one crockpot.

Here's the recipe:

New Year Soup

1 lb. ground pork, browned

1 head of cabbage, chopped

1 onion, chopped

1 large bottle V-8 juice

1 bottle of beer

1 can of black-eyed peas

Seasoning to taste:  salt and pepper, garlic powder, cumin, rosemary, tabasco sauce

Put all ingredients in a crock pot  and cook on low 6-8 hours.  Serve with cornbread.