New Year's Day Feast

Brad and Joey treated us to a wonderfully tasty New Year's Day feast, featuring traditional Southern fare of black-eyed peas, collared greens and cornbread. It was a fantastic meal. Brad is a vegetarian, so the whole meal was meat-free, and he succeeded in making delicious black-eyed peas without using pork. His collared greens were also perfectly cooked--using lots of butter helps--and his cornbread was rich, but not overly sweet. For dessert, Joey pulled out two overflowing platters of cookies. He had apparently spent a day baking cookies after returning from his holiday travels, and he made two kinds of shortbread, plain and bourbon, soft ginger cookies, chocolate chip and walnut and several others. My favorite was the bourbon shortbread cookies. It was a perfectly mellow and delicious start to the new year.