Cute, but hard.

Did you ever read my post, "Cute, but gross"? This will run in a similar vein. I get these grand ideas, and then they end up being either really gross or really stressful. This involved a little of both.

I'm talkin' St. Patrick's Day food, folks.

Kay. So, if you remember, I was all excited about St. Patty's Day. I just wanted to make it fun and special and out-of-the-ordinary. A way to beat the winter blahs. My friend, Lynds (her blog is private; otherwise I'd send you right over there), is Supermom, right? She did a blog post on all this cute stuff she did for Valentine's Day, and I thought to myself, I'm going to pick her brain and see what she's doing for St. Patty's Day. Because I'm a copycat. We have established that fact many a time.

So I commented on her blog, begging her to tell me what her plans were for the Day of Green. She was so cute and sent me an e-mail just a couple of days later with many, many plans. And I followed every single plan to the letter, and then some.

It kicked my butt.

Let's start with the night before St. Patty's Day. We'll call it St. Patty's Day Eve, shall we? I decided to make green food for everyone's lunches. I made green bread:

I had to work the night before, so I didn't start the bread until 10 at night. Which means that I was up until 2. Blah.

I also made some cookies to put into everyone's lunches. I do not regret one single iota of these cookies. They were easy to make and absolutelyAMAZING. Mint chocolate chip cookies with creme de menthe chips and chocolate chips. Yummmmm:

My family ate them in like five hours. Or less.

Then I bought Sprite (green bottles), green apples, and extra greenery for the sandwiches - sprouts, cucumbers, and avocados. I thought briefly of "painting" the deli meat green (apparently, that's how you make green ham when you do green-eggs-and-ham - you "paint" the ham with water that has food coloring on it) but was too exhausted. Here is Dylan's lunch:

Later that afternoon, he raved about how cool his lunch was and how everyone thought I was so awesome for doing that for him, which was gratifying, but so not worth the extra time and exhaustion.

Next year, I am definitely going with the creme de menthe cookies, but I think I'm going to be a fuddy duddy and skip the green bread. It was no prob to have green apples and sprite, so I'll probably do that again.

Alright. Breakfast. I bought a shamrock cookie cutter and made green pancakes, then cut each pancake with the cookie cutters:

Then I made green scrambled eggs:

And arranged a fruit rainbow:

You know - because leprechauns keep their pots of gold at the end of the rainbow? Oh, and green milk to drink (I totally used up all of my green food coloring doing all this stuff):

I didn't get up early enough to make all this in time for Ben or Dylan to partake. Dylan has asked me every single morning since St. Patrick's Day if I can make him some green shamrock pancakes, since he missed out. I told him sorry - next year.

Conclusion - I think next year, I will do this special breakfast on the Sunday before St. Patrick's Day, when I have time to do it and kids aren't running around getting ready for school.

Okay. Dinner. Lynds gave me a very easy crock pot recipe for corned beef and cabbage. When I told Dad a couple of days earlier that I was making corned beef, he made a face. I've never had corned beef before, so I said, "What's that face?"

"Oh, it's gross," he said.

"Really?"

"Yep."

I was nervous. But I had spent good money on it, so of course I gave it a shot. It turned out great:

I was freaking out because it was still red when it was supposed to be done, but I looked it up online and they said that's how corned beef is supposed to look. I put my meat thermometer in, though, just to make double-sure.

Um, corned beef is FATTY. I'm not a huge meat girl anyways, but marbley meat is not my favorite. I don't like chewing on gristle. I like to "chew the fat" figuratively, NOT literally. Ben, of course, adored it. He ate the leftovers for a week.

Funny story about how fatty corned beef is. Ben went to donate plasma one day when he had eaten leftover corned beef for lunch. They could not get the machine to take his blood. They asked him what he ate that day. He said, "corned beef."

They said, "Ohhhhh, yeah, that makes sense."

Ben was like, "The machine doesn't like your blood if you eat corned beef?"

They were all, "Corned beef is too fatty. If you eat anything too fatty, the machine has a hard time extracting your blood."

Who knew? He had to go home - no plasma donation that day. :)

Here are the potatoes, carrots, and cabbage that cooked along with the beef in the crock pot - they were fantastic:

Lynds gave me an Irish Soda Bread recipe, as well:

I had never even heard of Irish Soda Bread! It was wonderful. It tasted like biscuits. With raisins in them. I was telling my friend in spinning class about the Irish Soda Bread that I made, and this dude in our class overheard us and totally interrupted us. "Oh, you haven't had Irish Soda Bread until you've had my wife's! I'm going to bring you her recipe!" And the man did. The very next class, there he was with his wife's recipe. It was cute.

Then I made jello jigglers and cut them into round shapes to look like gold coins (again, Lynds's idea - all of these ideas are hers):

And "Green Grog" for a drink:

It was a wonderful meal. I think next year, I'm just going to make a roast in the crock pot and skip out on the gristle. I'm going to make more jigglers than I did this year and maybe try that man's wife's Irish Soda Bread recipe. Why not, right?

Then it was time to make dessert - grasshopper pie. My two helpers were readily available, of course:

Oh, the grasshopper pie. Much drama ensued with it. I was telling my sis, Beads, about my St. Patrick's Day plans, and I told her I was making grasshopper pie for dessert, and she asked me to send the recipe that Lynds had sent me. So I forwarded it to her. I guess there's a typo in the recipe - it asks you to use one tablespoon of mint extract, but you're supposed to use one teaspoon. Beads made her pie before I got to mine, and she called me and was like, "This pie tastes like TOOTHPASTE!!! What the heck???" I looked at the recipe and realized what had happened. I felt really badly about that.

Mine turned out as it should, thanks to Brianna's warning. I just used one teaspoon of mint extract:

It also called for chocolate extract, which I looked all over the city for and never found, so I used chocolate syrup. Lame-o.

The pie tasted fine, but I realized as I was eating it that what I really wanted in that oreo crust, instead of this minty cream filling, was just plain old mint chocolate chip ice cream. It's my favorite ice cream flavor, so it's natural that I was feeling a yen for that instead of the fluffy cream. So I think I'm doing that next year - filling the pie crust with ice cream instead.

So there you have it. My extremely busy cooking day. I need to learn from this experience - like that scripture says, "Don't run faster than you have strength." It's a problem for me. I'm working on it. Lynds, thank you, thank you, thank you for all of the ideas and the wonderful recipes!

If you want any of these recipes, lemme know.