What’s Cooking: The Sunday Dinner – New Year Special

Happy New Year!! Hope everyone had a beautiful and blessed day.

I come from a traditional Haitian family. On New Year’s Day, if you go to any Haitian families home you will find that they are having a special soup that we call “soup joumou” for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Soup joumou or “squash soup”, is a hearty soup that we have on new year to mark Haiti’s independence from France on January 1st 1804. Slaves were not allowed to eat soup and thus it has become a tradition for Haitian’s nationwide to have soup on New Year. For as long as I can remember, well my entire life to be honest, we have always had soup joumou on January 1st and I absolutely love it. There’s something so comforting with this soup, it’s yummy and beyond tasty, filled with squash, carrots, spinach, noodles and beef.

So today’s Sunday Dinner special is in honor of my beloved country Haiti. Thankfully, I didn’t have to cook, I was tired and I honestly don’t make the best soup joumou. My aunt had the pleasure of making a HUGE pot of soup joumou for the family. I totally forgot to take a picture of the pot, it’s an insanely big pot, but here’s a photo of my second bowl of soup, yum!

How did you celebrate the New Year? Any special traditions in your family?