Looking ahead to New Years
With Christmas just passed, I look forward to the next festive meal.
Christmas was a close repeat of Thanksgiving, fresh turkey (15 lb), baked sweet potatoes, bread filling with giblet gravy and asparagus. After all these years I am closing in on matching my Mother's bread filling Thumbup
Back to New Years: we are going to have a small, specially selected, and equally cautious friends (3) and one son (working from home) over. My traditional New Years meal has been pork and sauerkraut--in keeping with my Pa Dutch roots. I always manage to find homemade sauerkraut for that---and I love it, but alas, I'm afraid my enthusiasm is not shared by all of our traditionally guests :shrug:
So---in a spirit of welcoming a new and better year--I am changing the menu--to a degree :hatoff: The Pa Dutch have an honored tradition of eating pork on new years, day. The reason: pigs always root forward for their food and it reminds us to always move forward.
This year it will be traditional Irish Bacon and Cabbage.
The cabbage will be Savoy and since I would have to take a trip to northern Jersey for Irish Bacon I will use a boneless smoked pork shoulder that I have in the freezer. With that, I am going to serve a mixture (50/50) of mashed potatoes and turnips with the parsley sauce. The sauce, despite sounding a bit bland brings the entire dish together.
A word on turnips: when I was a kid we raised and ate a lot of turnips. I never mentioned that to any of my school mates. I'm not sure that I knew why, but turnips were considered to be eaten by poor folk---never by the "well to do". While I never thought we were poor, I wasn't about to open a whispered discussion:rolleyes2:
This week at a local farm market I was pulled in by a display of lovely turnips and after getting home I first looked at nutrition (they are a true health food) and then read this:
Quote:
Before potatoes were abundant beyond South America, turnips were everyday staples, particularly in Europe during the Middle Ages. Thriving in a cold, damp climate, turnips were the food of Europe’s poor.
---imagine, 500 plus years latter, they still held the same prejudicial "cast".
