St. Patrick's Day meal (or two)

Hi Everyone! Yesterday  mentioned Jim had made Irish Soda Bread and I was hoping to post about it. This is that post! {smile} Neither of us had ever had soda bread so this was a first. The whole meal was a bunch of firsts. Perhaps I should back up! We thought it would be fun to have St. Patrick's Day dinner with Jim's Mom and Step-Dad. Jim's Mom loves to cook and we all like to try new things. The menu started out with reuben sandwiches and colcannon (more on this soon). Jim's Mom was bringing roasted veggies, homemade thousand island and an Irish dessert of some sort.  The soda bread, not on the menu, but something Jim had been talking about trying. Try he did.  Here is is before it goes in the oven. Do you know why you cut it like this? To let the fairies out!!!! (this made me giggle and I was very much upset when I didn't see any fairies escape...jim told me i couldn't see them since i didn't have special fairy seeing glasses...i'm gonna go with that)

Here's the link to the recipe Jim used.

Irish Soda Bread recipe

Here it is out of the oven. 

Kinda neat looking.

Smelled good.

It was good and we decided over dinner it would make great toast.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Colcannon:

Colcannon is traditionally made from mashed potatoes and kale (or cabbage), with scallions, butter, salt and pepper added. It can contain other ingredients such as milk,cream, leeks, onions and chives.^[1] It is often eaten with boiled ham or Irish bacon. At one time it was a cheap, year-round staple food,^[2] though nowadays it is usually eaten in autumn/winter, when kale comes into season.^[3]

An old Irish Halloween tradition was to serve colcannon with prizes of small coins concealed in it, as the Irish, English and Scots do with Christmas pudding.

The Welsh dish cawl cennin, despite the somewhat similar sound of the expression, is etymologically unrelated to colcannon, and is a leek soup, literally "broth (of) leeks."^[4]

For ours we made mashed potatoes and added in blanched kale and crumbled bacon.

We did decide the addition of onions or chives would be great too. We just made the mashed potatoes like normal and then added in the blanched kale and bacon. 

It was pretty.

It was healthy.

It was good.

Here's a (not so great) picture of our table.

The roasted vegetables and colcannon took center stage here, but the reubens (which you can almost see) were amazing as always! There is enough corned beef and swiss left that we will probably be having a reuben pizza night this week.  {yum}

We had a delicious meal and everyone enjoyed all the firsts involved.

The dessert was an Irish potato cake. No pics or recipes, but it was tasty tasty too! 

Jim's Mom made some homemade whipped cream and colored it green for the occasion.

I made mention the soda bread would make good toast.

It did!!!

The colcannon also made AMAZING potato cakes!

Aw yes!!! Last night's leftovers turned into this morning's breakfast!

YUMMM!!

Thanks so much for stopping by!

hugs