The Eating of the Green

Yeah, I definitely woke up today thinking St. Patrick's Day was tomorrow. I don't know why I had Tuesday fixed in my head, but I did. Not that it mattered in the least, since the only thing I do to celebrate is make corned beef.  Considering that I didn't even get my beef in the brine until yesterday, we are still several days from even that lame attempt to mark the holiday.

Anyway.

I had a hard time explaining this holiday to Cubby, who was understandably confused not only by the general idea of saints (my Catholic upbringing is not being passed on to him very well, I'm afraid), but also the whole concept of a country called Ireland and Irish immigrants wishing to reconnect to their roots.

Whatever. I was totally making it all up anyway.

I did, however, tell him about this one time when I was a kid and my mom decided to color our mashed potatoes and milk and whatnot at dinner with green food coloring on St. Patrick's Day. She was fun like that*.

Cubby demanded an explanation of food coloring, and then stated very definitively that he did not want any of that in his food.

Right. So much for that festive little touch.

But we had a green meal anyway, and this amused me very much. Mostly because I did it completely inadvertently.

I had planned to have pasta with pesto for dinner tonight, in an attempt to get Cubby to eat more than three tablespoons of food in a sitting. He was very, very sick this past weekend, and was not down with the idea of feeding his cold. He hasn't been eating well at all, but he's feeling much better now and pasta with pesto is pretty much his favorite food in the world, so . . . green pasta it is.

Besides, I still have two gallon-sized Ziploc bags full of pesto cubes in my freezer from this past summer that I really need to make inroads on.

I also made a green salad, since I had lettuce in the refrigerator. And there we have it: A green St. Patrick's Day meal with no food coloring in sight.

The strawberries we had for dessert didn't really fit the theme, but I had already taken them out of the freezer to defrost. There were a couple of bits of renegade leaf still in there, so we'll count that.

And, uh, that's it. We didn't wear green, drink Guinness, or sport anything that reads, "Kiss Me, I'm Irish," but we had green food. Good enough.

* She also made us an April Fool's Day dinner one year in which we ate out of cooking pots and drank out of bowls and other crazy stuff like that. As I said, fun mom.