Does your family have special New Year’s Eve traditions? Living in Plant City, we get a lot of customer requests for black eye peas for their New Year’s Eve dinner. That was a new one for me. Apparently, black eye peas must be eaten around midnight or during New Year’s Day for good luck. Check out these links for different ways to prepare your black eye peas:
http://nourishedkitchen.com/black-eyed-pea-cakes/
http://steamykitchen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/black-eyed-peas-ham-recipe-6174.jpg
Our other must have item is grapes. We double up on grapes because those will all be gone come New Years Eve. Eating the grapes at midnight is something we always did growing up. Our dinner was always arroz con gandules (rice with pigeon peas), pernil (roasted pork), and guineitos en escabeche (pickled bananas). Now that I have my own family, we usually spend New Year’s Eve with friends that we don’t see on a regular basis. The menu is the least of our worries. In fact, I think last year we ordered pizza!
We’ve actually planned on cooking dinner this year. The guys will be grilling. We’ll be bringing some of our favorite things from our market: 🙂
The Market will be open on New Year’s Eve from 9 am to 3 pm. We’ll be closed on New Year’s Day and will reopen January 2nd at 9 am. We hope you have a Happy New Year with your loved ones and Best Wishes for the New Year from our family to yours! Happy New Year!
Pernil and the grapes are definitely part of my tradition. Would love to have some arroz con gandules <–delicious!