happy st. patty's day!

Happy belated St. Patrick's Day! I was so busy yesterday getting everything ready for our 'green' dinner that I didn't have a chance to get on the computer.

While I so love being the hostess and party planning, it can at times be a burden. I have to have the house 'just so', the decorations perfect and the food delicious and pretty. Because I'm sort of a perfectionist, I sometimes put unnecessary stress on myself and I don't start to enjoy the festivities until they begin. I want to enjoy the preparations too, after all, that's the best part for me.

Anyhoo, I decided that I'd make the main dish simple this year (well, it was simple last year too, I made shepherd's pie) so I made a home made turkey chili and corn bread. Everyone who came also brought a dish to share and the only requirement was that it had to be green (I know, chili and corn bread aren't exactly green but they seemed to fit the holiday anyhow!)

If you saw my last post, you know that I was putting together some sort of St. Patrick's Day craft. Well, I'm proud to say that after all my procrastination and many hours sitting at the kitchen table putting it together, I finally finished it during the wee hours of Wednesday morning. It took me so long because I had to make everything by hand because I don't have a Cricut machine, a Silhouette machine or even a Cuttlebug. All of which I'd love to have but the funds just don't allow it at this time. So I cut out each and every letter, used my handy dandy edging scissors to create the scalloped edges on the circles and decorated each circle one by one. I must say that it was fun. Even though it took awhile, I think the time put in was worth it because IMHO it turned out great! haha!



 As usual, I always like to send my guests home with a little 'parting gift' so I made some shamrock shaped sugar cookies, chocolate cover pretzel rods with St. Patty's Day jimmies and mini brownies baked in small gold candy cups. I put them all in these cute little St. Patty's Day 'Chinese take-out boxes' along with some green M&M's and some Andie's mints and closed'em up with some cute St. Patty's Day ribbon. I just love putting these things together. They just make me smile!





Here's a shot of the inside of one of the boxes. I think the brownies kinda look like little cups of gold with their gold wrappers!



Here are some of the shamrock sugar cookies that I decorated with some green glittery icing. I unfortunately wasn't able to include these in the goodie boxes because the icing didn't harden like I had hoped and I didn't want to make a mess of the boxes. I instead made some plain shamrock cookies that I made with some green food coloring. I was a tad bummed when I realized that I hadn't taken a single picture of those! You will however be able to see a teeny tiny bit of them in the pics I took of the entire table.



These are the chocolate covered pretzel rods I made. These are sooooo good! Let.me.tell.you!



I wrapped them up in some cute shamrock decorated baggies and tied them with some shamrock ribbon. You'll be able to get a small peek at them in the pic of the table.

As I said above, all the food, other than the main dish, was green. The buffet included an all green garden salad, an all green fruit salad, two different types of green jello and a green cake.

Garden salad:


Fruit salad:

And I'm not sure where my brain was, but I didn't get a picture of the two jellos nor did I get a picture of the chili or corn bread muffins. Boo. But they were all so yummy!

Pretty green cake made by my sister.in.law Kathleen:



Here's a shot of the table before it was set up for dinner. I had all the left over cookies, brownies and other goodies out to nibble on and just look at!



And here's a shot of the table all set up for dinner!



From left to right: my sister Lisa, my sister.in.law Kathleen and me! Notice the green flower hair clips in our hair. Michaels was having a sale on their silk flowers so I purchased three of these green flowers and decided to make them into hair clips! I added the cute little daisy button in the middle for a little extra cuteness!



So that was our St. Patrick's Day celebration! We had a nice time visiting, laughing and of course eating! I hope you all had fun no matter what you did!