Good Luck/Bad Luck

This week was New Years. We had our traditional good luck meal of black eye peas with ham bone, collard greens and corn bread. Our good luck lasted almost four hours.
We had just wound down from a big day of cooking and eating, and we were getting caught up on our back episodes of "The Black List" when we heard from the upstairs..."go get mom". That's never a good sign.
Turns out Jake had been tinkering with his fire pager, and the tinkering included using a pocket knife to jimmy something or other. What he managed to jimmy was his thumb onto the knife. We tried for about an hour to stop the bleeding, but had to make the schlep to the emergency room. Five stitches later, he's back on the mend, and Kattie Grace has dubbed him "nub".
The very same day, Jake's promotion to Fire Engineer kicked in.

Last known picture of an unsliced left thumb

Now on to the "good luck" meal. We saved the end of the country ham from Christmas for this occasion. We slow cooked the black eye peas in a cast iron pot all day. The collards we canned from the garden. The cornbread is made from scratch, none of those "Jiffy" packs in our house.

Meat off the bone. That's good eatin

Santa brought Big Man new spatulas for Christmas

We tried something a little new this week. Our pal "Elvis" and his wife were chatting back and forth on the Faceplace last week about a Chess pie. We had never heard of a Chess pie. Elvis was good enough to post a recipe, so we printed it out and decided to add it to our first meal of the year.

Gearing up

No store bought pie crust here

Going in

Coming out

It ended up tasting about like our buttermilk pie. This has a little bit more of a brown sugar flavor to it, but any pie that calls for corn meal and vinegar in the recipe we had to try.
One other food note this week, we broke in to the canned home made sauerkraut supply.

 We cooked it up with some brats and potatoes. All this meal needed was about a foot of snow on the ground outside. Maybe next week.
We ended the week with wings.
K&K