Celebrating the Irish...

Today -well, actually it's yesterday now since I'm writing this at 2 a.m. Friday, the 18th -was as everyone is aware, St. Patrick's Day.

It's a time when everyone or darned near everyone anyway, becomes a bit Irish, isn't it?

I've always "celebrated" St. Patrick's Day -often with several mugs of green beer too.

This year, for our "family" dinner this past Sunday I cooked a nice brisket of corned beef along with the potatoes, carrots and of course, cabbage for Mandy, my son and his girlfriend and myself all to enjoy. Didn't figure the kids would partake of this since they tend not to care for meat and potatoes but to my surprise, Maya and Kurtis both ate a little of the dinner and without a major hassle either -except for the cabbage -which they both pulled that substance off to the side and ignored it.

They each asked what that was and in an effort to avoid a lot of whining and complaining about how neither of them likes cabbage, I first told them to eat it, cause it's a vegetable. Well, the kids both turned into question boxes then and wanted to know the name of the vegetable so, continuing in my ploy to avoid saying "Cabbage" in front of them, I told them this was the "C" vegetable -a new item and very tasty. They bought that line long enough to at least taste the cabbage anyway.

Monday, I made my own corned beef hash by grinding up a little of the left over meat along with the leftover veggies and baked it -with some eggs broken on top of the hash. I figured by grinding the veggies all up, they'd get the cabbage and not even know it was in there and that actually worked! Not perfectly, but they ate a bit of the hash better that way than they would have if I'd simply just reheated the veggies and served it up.

Because I managed to volunteer to provide a dessert out at our church on three separate occasions over the coming month and I wanted to find something new, exciting-maybe -and different to fix, I bought one of those little cookbooks you see in the magazine racks at the store.

This one was all cupcakes! Some different recipes in some cases but a lot of them were neat and cute little ways to dress up cupcakes. I don't know why but I've never been big on making cupcakes for some reason or other but today, I decided to try this one recipe that looked really simple and interesting -St. Patrick's Day cupcakes!

It was an easy recipe -and no fancy decorating either -simply make this cake (from scratch) and add to it a package of instant pistachio pudding mix -which makes the cake a lovely light green shade. The frosting -also extremely simple -a can of cream cheese frosting with a couple drops of green food coloring in it.

Maya was quite excited about the cupcakes she saw when she arrived home from school. Mandy had been in town running some errands and had picked up a few groceries there which also included a box of six cupcakes too. So now, all of a sudden, we had 18, not just a dozen cupcakes here!

As Mandy looked around and saw that, she remarked to the new TSS here to work with Maya that this was the difference between a "modern" mother and a Grandma in that she had purchased cupcakes and Gram had made homemade cupcakes!

Then, she added to that thought by telling the TSS that this was one big way Gram is a lot different now than she was when Mandy was a kid because after all, Gram never made any special desserts for her and her siblings back then for St. Patrick's Day and why was that anyway?

My response?

I didn't have this cookbook back then!