Southern New Year's Day Soup

Happy New Year! Greens and black eyed peas are a traditional food for good luck in the new year, so this soup finds a way to combine the two into one dish, and also incorporates into soup Wednesday. The greens symbolized folded money, and the black eyed peas symbolized growing wealth. You can read more about it here.

More Soup Wednesday recipes: Pumpkin Black Bean Soup, Caprese Soup, Jalapeno Beer Cheese Soup, and Tomato Basil Avocado soup.

This recipe is from Vegetarian Times.

Ingredients:
-2 Tbs. olive oil
-1 leek, chopped
-2 cloves garlic, minced
-1 Tbs. poultry seasoning
-about 1/2 bunch kale, chopped
-1 15-oz. can diced tomatoes
-1 15-oz. can diced tomatoes with green chiles

-3/4 cup dried black-eyed peas
-1 qt. vegetable broth

-4 cups water
-1 1/2 cups farfalle pasta

Heat oil, and cook the leek for 5 minutes.

Cook the garlic and poultry seasoning for 1 minute.
Add kale, cook for 5 more minutes, until it is wilted.

Add tomatoes, chiles, peas, vegetable broth, and water.
Turn the heat down and cover. Simmer for 45 minutes.
Add the pasta and cook for 7 minutes, until the pasta is cooked.

This took a while to make, but it was mostly down time while the soup simmered, so it wasn't too bad. The original recipe called for 7 cups of water, but we cut it down to 4, which I think was a good choice, ours would have been really thin with more water, especially on top of all the vegetable broth. I liked the black eyed peas in the soup, it gave it a little bit of a different texture.