Bonne année 2019

It's almost midnight on the U.S. East Coast — approaching six a.m. in France. So it's 2019 here. 2018 went by in a flash, but it couldn't go fast enough for me. Let's hope for a better year this time around.

And I can't believe my black-eyed peas have been in the slow cooker for nearly nine hours and they aren't done yet! I guess I should have started them in boiling broth. It must have taken hours — I was sleeping — for the cooker to come up to temperature.

I've taken the black-eyes (called haricots cornille here in France) out of the slow cooker and put them in a big pot on higher heat to finish. Of course we won't eat them for another seven or eight hours, so it shouldn't be a problem. The ones we get here come from Portugal, but the package doesn't say where they were grown. Maybe in the U.S. Black-eyed peas are a variety of what are called "cowpeas" and they came originally from Africa.

Yesterday I spread a kilogram of haricots cornille out on a baking sheet in one layer so I could pick through them and eliminate the broken or shriveled ones, not to mention any extraneous matter I might have found (none this time). Then you just cook them in water or broth (a combination of pintade broth and potée broth for me this year).

U.S. Southerners (I'm from North Carolina) eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day out of superstition. Eating them on January 1 is supposed to bring you good luck for the new year. We'll have ours with Toulouse sausage, smoked pork belly (poitrine de porc fumée), and confit de canard (slow-cooked duck, in this case leg-thigh pieces and gizzards). I guess I'll make another salade de scarole, plain this time, to round out the meal. Or maybe I'll take some garden-grown collard greens out of the freezer.

All the best to you all in 2019.