Happy New Year, Sylvia.

Can you believe it's 2025?

No.

Oh, no.

But, you know, there's some good things about 2025.

too much to go into, but you and I have had our challenges, but, hey, we're ready.

Let's go for it, okay?

Hey, one thing I wanted to tell you, though, this is the only time

of the year you want to be a loser.

yeah.

That weight you put on with all that peanut butter

fudge, which is my all time favorite.

Oh, I'm not a big fudge fan, but my dad was a fudge fan.

And transporting fudge is not easy.

Like you pack it up and it either gets smooshed or it melts, or it looks

like something you'd wipe off the bottom of your shoe when you're done.

Oh, my mother in law made the best.

I mean, it's just that right creaminess, you know?

maybe Grandmama made better fudge than the

kind that you get at the store

I think so.

it's all sugary and crystallizing.

No, no, no.

Her's was powerful.

Okay, yeah, let's go for it.

Superstitions, now we've covered that a lot

We, we have covered superstitions, but I got a few new ones

for you because, after drinking a few glasses of champagne, well, maybe more

than a few glasses of champagne, I think we need some good luck to get us out

of the hangover from the old year and into something new for the new year.

yeah.

And what you're not supposed to do, maybe,

Yeah, what you're not supposed to do.

You're not supposed to drink too much champagne.

drink wine.

There's never too much wine.

Well, That's true.

A little bubble goes a long way.

So I've got a few foods that are kind of weird that I never even thought of.

Things that we eat every day.

Well, maybe not every day, but the superstition on things that you

shouldn't eat, because you don't want to add good, or well, you don't

want to add bad luck to the new year, is you shouldn't eat chicken.

Like, isn't that weird?

No way.

Yeah,

live on chicken.

I know, right?

Chicken and fish and everything else, but chicken specifically, and you know why?

Why?

Well, apparently, I've never owned a chicken, but we've

No, and I hope never to.

Yeah, I might want to do that for some fresh eggs, but even still,

they say that chickens scratch backwards.

I never, like, I

No, I'm trying to visualize a chicken.

Right, I never observed a chicken behavior patterns.

never saw that as being on my life plan to observe a chicken.

But now you're going to make me want to do it.

By the way, you're the one that can have chickens now, because you've

got a country kind of place that

Yeah, we got a couple acres that we're moving into fairly soon,

actually, about this recording, we should be moving in a fairly soon, but

as of the new year, we should be there.

So you will be

Yeah, you know, do you know how many varieties of chickens there are?

It's pretty amazing.

I certainly can't count them on one hand for

Oh, I mean, and it's like the meat is supposed to be different.

I'm just like, chicken, give me chicken, except for the new year.

I'll wait a couple of months.

Oh,

that does this.

And there's some funny chickens, I grew up riding horses and you're in horse

country, but there are these chickens that have these poofy heads and feet.

And when my husband saw them for the first time, they used to run

around the barns where I was.

He would call them draft chickens, like draft horses, because they

had the feathers on their feet.

how funny.

chickens, because they kind of look like poodles.

So next time anybody listening sees these chickens that have poofy hair and

poofy feet, you just either think that they're poodle chickens or draft chickens.

to ask, get a little off subject, but did

they hang around the horses?

Was it a special breed because they got along with horses

or horse whisperer birds?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I think these chickens were kind

Just came

they were kind of elitist chickens.

They were the fancy chickens that the horse owners had and they just, they

were cool to have around the barn.

But yeah, they knew how to get away from underfoot pretty

quickly, but they were pretty cool.

So chicken is one thing, lobsters, lobster is another one.

Now, if you're from New England, oh my god, I

That's a big deal.

Yeah.

I can't think of not eating lobster on New Year's, but lobsters

or those kind of, you know, spiny crustaceans, they also, they move

backwards, and they move sideways.

So, the whole idea here is that you don't want to move things backwards

when you want to go forward in the New

You want to go forward.

Yeah.

Yeah, right, and you don't want to go sideways.

So you don't want to, I wouldn't say put off doing things, but

you, you don't want to create bad luck that whatever you're doing

No.

Tread lightly.

Tread very lightly.

I think that's good.

Hey, what can we do, though, in 2025?

What's some new stuff we can do,

Well, I'm going to add, there's some good luck stuff.

On the moving forward, it's good luck to eat pork because the pigs,

again, I have never become friendly with a pig, actually burrow forward.

So they, they root or the

rut

Root.

So does my dog.

Yeah,

I don't

my dog does the same thing.

Hey, you know how to stop your dog from burrowing in a hole?

Howl, Howl, Uh,

from a dog trainer.

You take some of their dog poops and you put it in the hole where they're

digging and then you cover it over so that when they dig, surprise,

you don't want to dig into that.

But it does work.

We tried that.

It's like, oh, the problem is getting the poop in the hole.

Yeah, Well,

But I guess, lucky pork.

Good for you, I certainly wouldn't want to be the pig because I don't

consider that too lucky for the pig.

Hey, You Know, It's Supposed To Be Great Animals, So,

They're supposed to be very Smart,

They, An Octopus, And every time we serve octopus in our

restaurant, I'm always like, But it's such an intelligent animal.

I am such a bleeding heart.

I

animal like an octopus that can change its outfit at the blink of an eye.

It has multiple brains.

God knows I need more than one

I know.

It's got all those arms so it can suck good things in

and like, get away the bad stuff.

And then it's got a beak.

It can bite anything it wants to get rid of.

I love it.

I want to grow up and be an octopus or something.

I could.

and it chops off an arm.

I guess it goes back, but I can't imagine that's got to hurt.

Yeah.

Octopi,

There's a movie or a documentary about that.

Anyway.

Oh, there's a great book on that, but we can talk about

Yeah, we'll talk about that later.

Sauerkraut's another one that's kind of weird.

Do you know about sauerkraut?

I love sauerkraut.

I do know that.

Good for me.

One of the few things that I could eat just tons of that's so good for you.

Well, it's hard to get really good sauerkraut, right?

Because some of it's too vinegary and then it's got sort of a nice, you

know, in the city up in well, I say the city of New York, because that's

where my point of origination was.

If you want to call it that is they call them the dirty water hot dogs that were

on the corners that people would sell in the carts and they always had sauerkraut.

But the sauerkraut for some reason in those hot dog vendors was always so good.

It was mild and it was gentle and it was just, it was always like the best.

And when you buy it and make it yourself, it doesn't seem to be the best, but

there's a German tradition that's supposed to help you create wealth and

riches all related around sauerkraut.

I'm all in.

Tell me.

tell me about it.

Right.

And the weird thing is that you're supposed to create a wish for every shred

of cabbage in the sauerkraut that you eat.

But, who counts the string of cabbage and sauerkraut?

Uh, no, no, no, no, no.

I'll just eat it.

And hope for the best in times of luck.

I do think that's kind of weird.

But

But I do love sauerkraut.

That's kind of unusual.

You know, I remember as a kid I loved it.

yeah, maybe at the stroke of midnight while you're drinking your

wine and I'm drinking my champagne, we'll count the sauerkraut shreds.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So, New Year's.

Yeah.

Wow.

what else we got?

we got resolutions

And what, what can we do?

We can start a new tradition, since we're all about tradition, right?

you have your old ones, you could try a recipe that you've never had before,

right?

Or you could try to like something that you didn't eat I am not a fan of spinach.

I will eat it in lettuce, fresh, but my mom used to force us to eat spinach.

Well, sorry, mom, maybe force is a strong word, but she'd always

put it on the plate saying, it's good for you, it's good for you.

And it was that frozen brick spinach

Yeah, oh

get like boiled to, I would say, excuse me, listeners, if this

grosses you out, but it reminds me of snot going down the back of your throat.

Not that that happened that often, but like when you get that cold

and that runny, oh, disgusting.

So I could think it was like green snot.

My husband loves it.

You can have your snotty spinach.

I'll put it in a salad.

Thank you very much.

so I guess One of my resolutions will be to try to, to like, or try spinach

I just try, and I'll try to eat more green stuff, because

it's I know it's good for you.

you know, it's really interesting, talking about the produce

aisle, is that all this stuff was, growing up, our parents didn't do this.

It was sort of, you, well, my mom, My mom had this pot that she was,

I would consider her favorite pot.

It was an aluminum pot.

I'm probably going to die of aluminum poisoning at some point in my life.

But anyway, everything cooked in this one particular pot, whether it was

Yeah.

She

whether it.

was oiled, whatever it was the aluminum pot.

It's that texture of that, whatever it was, but we didn't

do those things growing up.

I think it's kind of cool that we have all these new foods and the traditions that we

can do to pull out new recipes and ideas and things that we can share together.

Well, here's a leftover idea.

when I was in Duluth, Minnesota with my son, he and I cooked Thanksgiving

dinner and you had the turkey carcass that was leftover, right?

Well, I always throw the thing away.

I shouldn't.

I go in there and he's got a giant pot and he's cut up the,

or broken up the The carcass, and he's boiling it with vegetables.

It's and the consistency was like a thin soup, and it's bone broth,

but you know, all of that stuff.

And, and then he's going to use it like all year long.

Wow.

All year long.

My kid, my kid.

Well, speaking of your kid, maybe we should take a break right now

and we'll talk about other leftovers and what we should do in the new years.

Sounds great.

welcome back where we left off with leftovers.

How appropriate is that?

Right?

I love it.

Yeah, you can.

They go a long way too, for those of us who preserve and can and all that stuff.

I'm amazed

you mentioned the turkey soup and the turkey

carcass that your son was making.

And my, I call my husband, the king of crock pot wonders.

And it was the instapot.

He's the instapot king.

And he takes all the carcasses and he, call it, the never ending pot of soup.

And before we met, he'd been married and divorced and that was the insta

pot of the day or the pot that he had was always the endless bottomless pot

of soup, would feed him and his dog.

So

he's taken that tradition forward and taught me how to make soup.

He makes the best soup, but.

There are also other leftover things that we have over the Christmas

holidays, right, because it's not just turkey, it's ham and it's

all sorts of things that we do.

Stuffing.

Stuffing.

Stuffing.

What do you do with it?

Oh, I make stuffing sandwiches.

have you ever had, a bread sandwich?

So

my bread sandwich is, bread, stuffing, bread.

But the stuffing is so good that you gotta find a use for it.

Right?

And you make it in quantity,

You need a resolution of a diet after that one, because like, how

much bread can slather on my thighs?

Thank you.

Yeah.

Delicious.

I'm still trying to find oyster dressing, by the way.

Everybody has a year to get me an oyster stuffing recipe.

Well, I'm gonna find one for you.

but I don't consider oysters to be a thing in Kentucky.

That's kind of weird.

isn't it, and yet it was Country Cook that

made the best oyster dressing.

Ah,

it just adds that richness to it,

that must have been the

that Class, I don't know that there are any, yeah, there are.

Most of them are in the horsey world, though.

So here's another one.

Yeah, how about, what do you do with leftover gingerbread?

Oh, tell me.

there are a couple of things we can do, but I found that there's

this Scandinavian tradition that you actually burn the gingerbread house.

To me, that sounds like a rather pyrotechnic feat in the

kitchen that I probably don't want to do in the kitchen, but,

sort of counterintuitive too, you're burning houses.

like, right?

But that's what they do.

They burn, these gingerbread houses.

Have you ever made a gingerbread house?

Never.

Okay, so I've always wanted to do 1, but, um, a couple of years

ago, you know, how are they have these kits in the grocery stores?

So I got like, 4 kits and I made for

gingerbread at

really?

Were they hard?

I look

Oh, they're not hard to do.

It's kind of fun, but then what do you do with it afterwards?

And so I gave it away to the neighbors after New Year's and the kid looked at

me like, yeah, what do I do with this?

I should have said, here's a match.

Were they different styles of houses?

Oh,

there was a cottage.

They had cute little critters that came with it.

And you put.

You know, um, was it

the, um, the powdered sugar on it?

So, but it was a decoration for a table when we had a party

and it was kind of fun, but I couldn't get anybody to taste it.

So,

Did you burn them?

Oh, I didn't burn it.

I gave him to neighbor's kid.

I should have burned.

I said, I should have given him the matches.

Right.

But here's some other things you can do with gingerbread houses,

which I thought were pretty cool.

Instead of burning them or.

Chucking them in the garbage, you know, you don't have to

get really hard and crusty.

Uh huh.

Well, take that, take the pieces, put them in a plastic bag,

crunch them up and think about the, the crust that you make for, a cream

cheesecake or something like that,

you know, the gram.

So you substitute the gingerbread

for the graham crackers,

That's perfect.

Or a lemon chiffon pie or I love lemon chiffon pies.

Oh, my God.

They're so good.

They're so

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

Oh, yes.

But they're really good, or even sprinkling it on top of ice cream,

Well, yeah.

Yeah,

or do it as a mix in for ice cream.

So those are some traditions to get rid of the, sweet old foods

that you become really hard.

I am so into conserving where you can, It just seems right.

If you go through the trouble of making a gingerbread house, then

you should use it in various ways.

Or a turkey carcass,

right, right, or maybe you watch the, Godzilla Smashing Houses

and you can play your inner Godzilla

I guess.

Well, what do you do with the Christmas tree?

I want your answer on that one.

Oh, the Christmas tree.

Well, we're going to do an episode on that 1, but, the Christmas tree.

We used to burn the Christmas tree.

actually, the funny stories, our house, back north, we

lived on the edge of a hill.

So there's, there was a wall and then, you There was a hill on the other side

and we would just toss our Christmas trees over the hill and Bob one day said,

what are you going to do when I die?

And I said, I'm just going to throw you over the hill with the Christmas trees.

wherever you are.

I don't think that should be a tradition.

But anyway,

Yeah, no, no, we need Bob to keep you under control.

Watch out!

Crazy lady in the kitchen!

Yeah.

But we do, we, we got New Year's, we got healthy foods and all the

Oh, no.

And I get really into that, by the way.

I really do.

I get, you know, I get into this spirit of, all right, I've let it

slide now from about October on.

But here's the big thing.

You want to hear the big thing for 2025?

Fermented foods.

They're very good for you, and it's a variety of things, and I

was trying my best to find why.

Why are they so good for you?

And all the stuff you read, it's like they release, enzymes, and my, a macro,

You know, micro little, those little old guys, yeah, that live in your gut and

stuff, supposed to be really good for you.

And I still, I'm still wondering, okay, so they do all those

things, but how does that happen?

What is fermentation?

And it's like all the other stuff, like aged anything releases enzymes, you

pull out all the moisture out of all the water and you, and salt is one of the

That kind of sounds like my last birthday.

Yeah, but for some reason they're really good for you, and they

restore what is missing in your gut.

And there's more and more said about that.

Yeah, more and more done about that.

sourdough is fermented and that's a real big thing.

And I've got a friend who gave me a bunch of sourdough bread the other day.

She calls her bread Fred.

I did a post on Instagram on that.

So Fred the bread.

I love sourdough by the way.

It's so good.

beyond being good for you.

it's supposed to, be lower in gluten for those who are gluten

that's right.

And miso soup was another one of those.

But, I was telling you I went down a rabbit hole looking at these things,

like, how old can things be that you can still eat them, you know?

Because I'm fascinated, I've always been fascinated by dry aged beef, You're

not supposed to leave stuff out, right?

And it goes bad.

Well, this requires, an agent that pulls out all the moisture so it's dry aged.

So, it's kept in a very refrigerated, situation where it's not like you just

lay it out on the counter and call it dry aged beef, you'll die, right?

Because it's bad.

so you've got that, and then, eastern Kentucky smokehouses.

I was always fascinated with those because my grandfather had a smokehouse, and in

those smokehouses, it was usually a hog.

That they bought in the summer, raised it, and slaughtered it in November, and that

was what fed the family throughout their, wintertime in Kentucky, and that's cold.

Miss Floridian, that's cold out

Well, now I'm used to New England, Darlene.

in the hills of eastern Kentucky, but they

would, cure it with salt.

you'd have that carcass and you'd rub it with salt several times.

It was a serious undertaking, days long undertaking.

And, you rub it down and then you kept it in the smokehouse and then put the meat

up, hung it up, and that was country ham.

And, country ham's pretty famous.

It's very salty.

And we were talking about what do you get, how do you get salt out of food.

And,

know, the Norwegian fish that they had, the

salt fish, that's how they preserved it.

But, and that's like generations of traditions on that front, but

they soak it in milk and, soaking a whole ham in milk, that's, it

seems like a waste of milk, right?

They say to chop it up and put it in water.

And there's a whole, process you go through where you keep doing

that until it gets to the point.

And sometimes people will just eat it.

You've had an experience where it wasn't that fun, right?

Yeah, no, when we were on college tour, I was looking for

colleges and my folks, well, it's just like all families, they take their

kids around to go look at different campuses and see if this is the one.

We were coming back through Virginia, Colonial Williamsburg area, and my mom

saw a ham I guess it is like the big, the

Yeah, the big thing.

It looks like a big old shoulder or

something, you

exactly.

I,

know.

it's either their

butt whatever it is, but it was a big piece of meat and

it's covered in the linen cloth.

It's all in a little sack and it said Virginia ham on it, whatever it was.

And mom was so excited.

She was going to bring it back home.

We brought it back home to Massachusetts.

And, she's trying to figure out how to cook this thing.

And it was the nastiest piece of meat.

We all agreed.

it was hard.

It was dry and we didn't know what to do.

And then we were just, Like,

Toss it down the hillside, right?

yeah, with the Christmas trees.

Absolutely, we should have done that.

But it was pretty nasty.

So, we were disappointed, unfortunately.

City Ham.

City Ham is the modern version.

It's where they don't do, it's done in somewhat similar ways, but not only with

salt, and it takes a lot shorter time.

So it's a sweeter ham, like most of us Kentuckians will

make clear we want City Ham.

Now, do they actually label it Cityham when you buy it?

Well, you can go in a restaurant, and I don't know that I've

ever seen it labeled, but if you go to a restaurant, you can ask, is it City Ham?

And they'll say yes, and because it's mostly that's what it is in a restaurant

I wonder do they preserve it

differently?

Yeah, in a much compressed time.

It takes a lot of time to preserve it through, to make it

country ham, and it's very salty.

So you do have to go through this process if you're a city fied

person, and don't want to eat a lot of salt, or you have hypertension.

I don't know.

Back in the country, I don't think they worried about those things.

They

just

I'm thinking, I'm thinking country and Kentucky and only

driven through Kentucky once many years ago, never really stopping.

Unfortunately, I should, I'll have to come and visit.

So we'll,

we'll

of

course you

in for a while, but all I can think of is if you're going

to eat that country ham, you better have a jigger of moonshine next

Well, we can get that for you, too, that we can get you there.

And just in the future as a 2025 resolution order Cityham,

I will order city ham.

I'll see if they even have it down here.

I'll

it made me think of, going through the hills of Kentucky, you might

even find some roadkill along the way.

So, you know, we're country folk here.

No, there's a funny story though, in Williamsburg, Kentucky, there was

a huge news story about a little.

Vietnamese restaurant that had established itself there, and

someone saw them take a deer off the road and take it in the back door.

It was huge.

It was a huge news story.

yeah, we, saw something like that with turtles up

north.

Yeah, the big, well, I guess they're big, they're not box to those are small, but

there was this big turtle and the joke was like, okay, the turtle disappeared because

the Chinese restaurant and picked it up

Oh, well, you know, you have to be enterprising, right?

But,

you want to know what the oldest food that they have found?

Now, there's some canned goods that were 109 years old that were still edible.

well, I, I'm not sure I want to open that

Well, they even said that it smelled bad, and it

looked terrible, and they tasted it.

And I'm like, why

would you do that?

Why would you even, ick?

But anyway, honey, 3, 000 year old honey.

well, the Egyptians used it to preserve bodies,

right?

so I guess,

you live longer.

Eat that honey.

gosh, can you imagine?

I wonder if the bees were different back then than they are now?

Probably, I think everything is, but there are many

things that are better today, Right?

We're going to be optimists.

that age that are good, well, you're in bourbon country, and then

there's certainly red, good red wine, although you're in bourbon country,

Bourbon country.

That's all about age.

And we're going to do that in a separate show.

We're going to go about our way with bourbon.

it'll be fun.

I'm excited to learn about bourbon.

It's not something that I've gotten involved in, but uh, you know what?

Maybe there's a resolution to try a little bourbon in the new year.

Yeah, they say it's great.

Now I'm a wino.

I'm a wino too.

Although we've really gotten interested in the non alcoholic beers lately, my

husband and I, Bob and I, and there's some really different between the tastes.

I'm surprised at How broad the taste and the differences

between from, O'Doul's to Miller.

Sorry, sorry, Miller, but God, I might as well drink a glass of water.

Really?

It's really kind of

That's like Miller Lite or something?

Yeah.

And then, uh, and then we found some others that were done by

Trappist monks that were good, although I think they probably had alcohol

in it, but that was pretty good too.

Anyway, so New Year's resolution, maybe, if I'm not drinking wine or

bourbon, It's the non alcoholic beer,

which is growing.

So there's a lot that's going to happen in 2025, and we hope that

you're going to stick around for a long, a lot more time to go.

But before we go, I have one more kind of thing, and it doesn't really necessarily

deal with food, but the new year is kind of interesting, and always around

March, I start to panic and thinking that the new year is over, I haven't gotten

anything done, what am I going to do?

It's March already!

It's

March already!

So yeah,

I'll try not to panic as a New Year's resolution.

I love that.

I'm going to adopt that one, too.

Just take it slow and

easy.

Like

your, uh, like your slow cooker, you know?

It's a time to calm down, too.

absolutely.

And we actually want to make sure that people are taking the time to pull

a chair up to your table and have a conversation and really enjoy that meal.

Put down your cell phones.

Well, maybe not if you're listening to the show, but

listen

Not always bad.

Yeah.

Yeah, but we do hope that you'll stick around and please share the

show in this episode and your ideas and the things that you're doing with

friends and family around the table, the traditions, the foods that you

love and the stories, because what's a meal without a story, right?

Because every recipe has a story and every story is a feast.

There you go.

Take care.

Bye bye.