Any Excuse To Party!

After our Dollarama inspired Valentine's Day celebration, I decided it would be fun to celebrate St Patrick's Day as well. Ever since having spent March 17th in Ireland with Australian friends about eight years ago, I have just had a special fondness for the holiday. Plus Dave and I spent some time in Ireland on our honeymoon. I have a secret hope that Dave will get transferred to his work's Ireland office England office for a year so we could really enjoy Ireland. (Okay, I really thought they had an office in Ireland but I guess he'd have to get transferred to London and then we could just vacation in Ireland a lot!)

Originally this was going to happen on the actual St Patrick's Day but then we got invited to our friends' house for supper and decided, that like Valentine's, St Patrick's can be celebrated at any time. So tonight was the night. I put on the Irish CD and found a Beef and Guinness stew recipe to make. Since it said to serve with champ potato, I also found a recipe for that. (And you should totally watch the video of the Beef and Guinness Stew making.) Wearing a Guinness apron while cooking with Guinness is totally necessary :)

For supper we broke out the celebratory costumes. We mostly got these because Sam thought they were so fun! Dave and I drank Guinness from our Guinness glasses from Ireland and I also made sparkling lime water for Sam, Dave and I to drink. The stew and champ were A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!! Even if I did use "veggie beef." I would highly recommend making this stew. It's definitely going in our repertoire of food we make on a regular basis.

And since today was the First Day of Spring (despite the fact we still have a ton of snow and very little sign that winter is releasing us from its icy and snowy grasp) and we have celebrated Spring the past few years with ice cream (2012 here and 2011 here), we made snow cream (see above parentheses about winter and its snowy grasp). I'd never heard of snow cream before my blog friend Sherry mentioned it. (She had mentioned it to me in a comment on that snow day we had in February and it took me this long to get my act together.) And to be in the St Patrick's Day spirit we dyed it green. Okay, well, mine was green and Sam's was green. But Sam wanted to use more colours and so Rachel got red and Dave got blue.

 

All I can say, is Oh. My. Word!!! If you ever get the chance to make snow cream DO IT! It is delicious. I owe Sherry a huge debt because she introduced me to this concept. Oh yum!

And then we ended the evening by watching Shrek, because I thought that was a good idea. Sam got these generic pull-ups from Wal-Mart and they have Shrek and Donkey and Puss In Boots on them. And Sam was resistant to wearing them because, after watching Cars, he wanted more Lighting McQueen pull-ups. I thought if he watched Shrek he might be more into them. Well, after fast-forwarding about a third of the movie (Sam was completely anti-Lord Farquaad -- Rachel was completely freaked out by Shrek so Dave just put her to bed), and after lots of interpretation by us, we finally finished it. After it was done I asked Sam, "So are you going to wear the Shrek pull-ups now?" and Sam replied, "Nope." So much for my "good idea."

And now I'm going to take the festive tablecloth off the table solely because Rachel keeps attempting her magic trick of pulling the tablecloth off without taking anything with her. Sadly, she has not perfected it.