Seeing Green

The past couple weeks have been pretty calm. I've cleared my schedule, except for tennis and a couple friend get-togethers,  and kept it that way. I've been doing a lot of spring cleaning/organizing. The weather has been spotty, but mostly still cold and rainy. Today, however, is beautiful and I just sat in the window reading and trying to feel the maximum amount of warmth possible. When I finally got up, my cheeks were pink. Ahhh. Spring is on its way.

We all had fun on St. Patrick's day. I don't know what took me so long to figure this one out, but this is the perfect day to cram my kids full of green food! Of course we always do the green pancakes and eggs, but I took it a bit further this time. I made their lunches green as well and served them some bright green kale with breakfast.


Good morning, Sunshine!


Kids' lunches


And look at what a healthy breakfast did to Nina! She is totally transformed and ready for school! Pretty sure she will NOT be pinched today.

 For dinner, I went with my own take on a traditional Irish meal. I just couldn't bring myself to make corned beef. Any meat you both boil and bake sounds too bad to be good. And a big slab of beef, no matter its form, always fails to interest me. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong, but this wasn't my year to try.

Instead I made an Irish Beef Stew and I totally surprised myself. The recipe was rather ordinary, but the end result was awesome. Like most recipes, I used this one as a loose guide. I used grass fed, organic ground beef in place of the chunks of beef (easiest for the tiniest mouths to chew). I also added lots of cabbage and kale, carrots and corn. I used chicken broth instead of beef (because that's what I had) and a bit more tomato paste and Worcestershire sauce. So basically I pretty much changed the recipe, but this turned out to be one of the best soups I've ever made. The kids dug it. I was sad Zig was away for this meal, but we drank some of his special root beers just to let him know we were thinking about him. I tried to save him some for the later in the week, but unfortunately he never got a taste of the Irish Stew. The kids had Thin Mints for dessert....I had a weak moment in front of the grocery store. It's hard to pass up those darling girl scouts. That's my excuse, anyway!




I also made Irish Soda Bread and a little salad.



Sela turned in her Science Fair and it was green, so I thought I'd include it with this post even though it's unrelated. She did a great job with her avocado experiment. While we were in Hawaii, she used the avocados in the yard to experiment with which ripening methods work fastest. Putting the avocado in a bag of flour was the clear winner! Who knew!



My little Leprechauns!