Happy St. Patrick's Day

I thought this mosaic I did with my class of students with Learning Disabilities was the perfect thing to share with you for St. Patrick's Day - being a rainbow that I'm sure has a pot of gold buried at each end.

We spent a fun class making these using dyed crushed egg shells and lots of glue.  The students had to work for each of the colours they got to add to the page so they were learning and having fun at the same time.  Their teacher told me they are going to go wild and design their own pictures with the leftover eggshells which sounded like a lot of fun too.

 Happy St. Patrick's day to all of you!  Do you have special plans for the day?

Linked to Spring Craft Party at Centsational Girl

Irish Soda Bread

Since today is St. Patrick's Day I made Irish Soda bread for dinner.  I used a recipe from Canadian Living (which you can find here).  It turned out really well and tasted great with our soup.

I loved all the shades of white from the flour on top,

to the flaky crust, 

and the soft creamy inside.

Yum - just one more slice!  I like mine with butter and honey.  How about you?

Linked to Friday Photo Challenge (White) at Razmataz
and the St. Patrick's Day Blog Crawl at Cuisine Kathleen

St. Patrick's Day

We have been cooking our way around the world for the past year and the first stop we made was Ireland.  I thought I would cook the same thing that I made for our stop in Ireland, since it is St. Patrick's Day.  Colcannon was a big hit with the family, so it is a recipe I'm happy to repeat.

Colcannon is really easy and I have to say one of the best ways to eat cabbage.  You know how healthy cabbage is, but it isn't always easy to use a big head of cabbage.  Colcannon not only uses a lot of cabbage but it is the ultimate comfort food.  I'm sure there are a lot of variations of the recipe but this is the one I used.

COLCANNON

Ingredients:

1 pound green cabbage

1 pound potatoes

2 leeks (for info on how to prepare leeks see here)

1 1/4 cup milk

1 pinch ground mace

salt and pepper to taste

1/4 cup melted butter

Directions:

1. Boil cabbage until tender, then drain and chop well.  Set aside and keep warm.

2. Boil potatoes until tender, then drain, season, and mash. 

3. Wash and chop leeks and simmer in milk until they are soft.

4. Stir the cooked leeks and milk, and chopped cabbage into the mashed potoates and heat the whole until it is a pale green fluff.
5. Make a well in the middle and pour in the melted butter.  Mix well.

Our green table just waiting for some dinner to be served.

One more peek at the fluffy, green yumminess.  Mmmmm!

Wishing you the luck of the Irish today!

Linked to Strut Your Stuff St. Patrick's Day link party at Somewhat Simple

p.s. Don't forget to enter the Easter egg giveaway, on until Sunday, March 21st.