St. Patrick's Day is in just a few days. My family has a couple of favorite themed foods for this holiday. One is a shamrock-shaped cookie. Some years I make gingerbread shamrocks and other years I make sugar cookies, either frosted with green icing or sprinkled with green sugar crystals or any green sprinkles leftover from Christmas baking.
Shamrock-shaped cookies and I go way back. When I was in the 4th grade, my mother was one of the room mothers for my classroom. This meant that for special days in the school year, my mother and one other mother made treats for all of my classmates, and we had a little party in the last 30 minutes of the school day. St. Patrick's Day was on a Tuesday that year. I remember because the afternoon before, I got to help my mom make some cookies while she stood at the ironing board, pressing my father's shirts for work. (Monday was laundry day, and it always ended with a pile of shirts to be pressed.) My mother let me use her shamrock cookie cutter to cut the dough that she had rolled out. The baked cookies were set aside while we all ate dinner. After I went to bed that night, my mom decorated the cookies. The next morning, I peeked under the lid of the large, rectangular Tupperware carrier sitting on the kitchen counter and saw that my mother had frosted the cookies in white and green, making curlicues of green frosting on all of the leaves of each shamrock. I remember feeling so proud of my mother's cookies, thinking about them as I waited through the day in school. The skinny, red second hand of the classroom's wall clock clicked throughout the afternoon hours, the movement from one second to the next feeling painfully slow. At last, the two room mothers appeared in the doorway. They poured cups of punch and placed those beautiful cookies on napkins, one for each of us. We lived just up the hill from the school, so my mother walked home with me after the class party. She said something about my big smile as we stepped off the curb and into the street. I just said that I was feeling happy that day.
The other food that I can't not serve for St. Patrick's Day is cabbage. I love cabbage. I love it as a slaw or sautéed with onions. The caramelized onions add sweetness to the pungent, cooked shreds of cabbage. This delicious dish only needs a sprinkling of salt and a dash of pepper to finish.
I've shared two of my favorite St. Patrick's Day foods and now I'm wondering, what are your favorite Irish-inspired foods for St. Patrick's Day? Share in the comments!
