Well, it is true about never being able to go home again...

For several years I have been making Hoppin John for New Years. Every year trying something a bit different in the hopes of it tasting like a memory.

This year, I finally realized that if you don't like black-eyed peas...Hoppin John is never gonna taste right. Add to that the fact that I am sure my Momma and Gma both cooked it long over slow heat and likely with some kind of fatback or something and you can imagine none of my renditions were the same.

But I think the big thing was just serving it with love...It was part of the holidays and when you weren't prosperous, eating Hoppin John for luck and collards for money to come in the New Year just had a sense of hope.

So yesterday, as we celebrated a New Year as a happy family with needs met...it hardly seemed like love to watch our teenagers choke down one bite each (one of them with chopsticks!) and then move on to something else. (Katie had eggrolls and Christie, chicken nuggets).

I moved rapidly past the sacrilege of seeing Hoppin John and eggrolls on the same plate to realize that I cannot keep some of our family traditions going. For a Southerner that seems just shy of failure but being a glass half full kind of girl, I hope there will be some other tradition that becomes just as meaningful.

The serving it with love part is, after all, the easiest.