Happy New Year!

We've been in Virginia long enough now that we figured we should adhere to the Southern tradition of eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. Such a meal is supposed to bring good luck and/or financial success in the year ahead and we certainly could use a bit of both. We didn't do the traditional Hoppin' John, opting instead to just cook the black-eyed peas in vegetable broth with onions and carrots and other yumminess. And speaking of yum, we also had some excellent cornbread and collard greens on the side.

Working backwards now, for breakfast this morning were the Zesty Cranberry Crumb Muffins from My Sweet Vegan. Only instead of cranberries we used dried cherries and instead of orange juice and zest we used some beautiful tangerines sent to us by my parents in Florida. I'll have to agree with Hannah that the streusel topping just makes everything better.

And backing up further, for our New Year's Eve dinner we had the White Bean Tartines from the latest issue of Vegetarian Times. They were a snap to throw together and they looked quite festive to boot. We used baby spinach instead of watercress and red cabbage instead of red onion. Those two items mixed with roasted red pepper went on top of a white bean/garlic/lemon juice puree, and it all went on top of toasted baguette slices.


We hope everyone out there has a great 2008! We're certainly looking forward to it ;-)