It's good to be green

The color isn't quite right, but here you can see the green cream of wheat I ate for breakfast Saturday morning--actually the only green-themed part of my St. Patrick's Day this year. I didn't even wear any green, but it's too late now, so you can't pinch me, even remotely. I enjoyed my farina with cut-up banana (it's under there) and a swirl of local honey.

A few years ago I sent one of my younger brothers a care package in honor of the holiday. I included some shamrock beads and homemade chocolate-chip cookies I attempted to die green. The color was a little odd (hard to do when the base is brown rather than white, like milk)--but the tragicomic thing about this attempt at sisterly love was that the cookies had come out rather flat and ugly. You see, DH and I were going through a rough patch. Yes, that's right: one of us had been buying el-cheapo flour at the grocery store, and our chocolate cookies were no longer rising. The first time this happened, I thought it was because I was talking on the phone while mixing the dough and had forgotten to add baking powder. MIL suggested I add more to the next batch, which I did, to no avail. Eventually, after much googling around and reading of random cooking threads, I discovered that other people had also had flat cookies and that the culprit was the unbleached flour. So we switched our flour and returned to chocolate-chip bliss.

What memorable green comestibles or potables have you ever consumed? What else have you ever food colored in honor of a holiday?