Any special food or drink for new Year Eve or New Year Day

add me to that group

I wear earplugs and go to sleep. Will likely be bottle rockets and such. Was never much of a New Year's person.

Here, black-eyed peas are considered lucky for the new year, and tamales are pretty big.

The first 2 years we lived here (Alabama) we rented a house in a smaller town and the old lady across the street had a sawed off shotgun she would fire in the air and the man next door would shoot his pistol in the air!!! It was a miserable 2 years but we bought a house in a nice suburb of Mobile (Saraland) and live in a fairly new, small subdivision that is very quiet, maybe a few fireworks from the kids but no guns. We are too old to move again so I hope this subdivision stays nice & quiet, its a mix of old and young, different races and different ethnic backgrounds and is basically a "bedroom" community.

Along with snacks, I purchased a couple bottles of "Miller High Life" bottled in Champagne bottles along with the champagne cork. It is the "champagne of bottled beers" - a very clever marketing gimmick IMHO.

a last minute decision for new year's day......trotters...
for the uninitiated,pig feet.
stopped in a local bodega yesterday looking for something else and saw they had some good looking footsies,cut up and cleaned very nicely.
got 'em into the pot a short time ago,with a big chopped white onion,celery,and a couple garlic bulbs.
will let 'em boil for 3 and a half hours,until it is fall off the bone tender.i soak 'em in hot sauce when i eat 'em.will have the leftover fried rice we got for new years eve with 'em.

now i realize some people,probably a lot of people,think this is,well,a no no item for eating.so,having not much else to do i'll poke out how i came to like trotters.
a million years ago when i was a kid my polish grand mom would come to stay for a few days around new years.i recall a seemingly day long process involving a pressure cooker,feet,some cheap veal ,onions and whatnot.her and ma would cook pot after pot,whole feet,until they just disintegrated.they'd fish out the done deal and using regular pliers and a hammer crack open the rock hard tiny bones and we would savor sucking out the marrow.the meat got poured into shallow rectangular glass pans to cool cool and jell into a solid outside (  hence the winter only event).
they called it souse,and we ate it in slices with white vinegar and hard crust rye bread. a real once a year  treat.
grandma passed early 60s,the family disintegrated in '67,dad running away as a wanted criminal about to do time and ma ending up spending her last years in the county nuthouse.strangely enough they both died within months of each other in '78.she by doing a lucy jordan off the nuthouse roof and him by some sort of big C,details of which i never bothered to ask as i had such a strong hatred for him.

so after grandma passed souse,or pig feet  just left the equation of my culinary life...until '78 when i made a life move and went to atlantic city for the excitement of working in a casino ( yeah,as exciting as what i imagine a job in a salt mine to be)
so i'm dating a black gal and she takes me to a soul food restaurant,something i'd never been to in my rural/suburban lifestyle and i see pig feet on the menu ...whoosh!,flash back a few decades to one of the few pleasant memories of childhood.hot damn!
i order 'em and the gal says huh,a white boy wanting feet?,no way. of course,sez i,expecting slices of souse with vinegar,i grew up with these.

so,the plates come and i'm looking at..wtf am i looking at? i see her grinning at me and i must admit to being a bit befuddled,but i am cool,i am very cool..i'm telling myself.i'm looking at two whole split feet and whatever her name was just kept grinning and and saying hmmm,hmmm,uh,well?
i decide honesty is the best policy when my primary motivation is like any first date to get laid,so i tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth and she laughs and says may i and cuts off a chink of foot with her fork ( if done right a fork is all one needs to partake),douses it in hot sauce and eats.now,since my childhood experience included eating the foot of a pig,the psychological aspect of eating such is within my realm of 'thing that is possible' i dig in...and i like 'em,smothered in hot sauce,tasting of the onion and garlic and myriad spices.i also had my first taste of collards,and mac and cheese that wasn't kraft dinner,yeah,kraft dinner with KETCHUP! yeah,mom wasn't much of a cook.

it's driving me crazy right now that i can't  remember this gals name.i can see her face,i can remember details of..well,enough of that.