I'm Green da ba dee da ba die

Today is the one the day of the year that's easy for Kermit the Frog to be green. For St. Patty's Day, I made corned beef and cabbage rolls, which took a lot of work to make.

 the rest of the slow cooked corned beef not used in the cabbage rolls

boiling quartered potatoes and corned beef

Potatoes had to be peeled and boiled for a good 2-3 hours (I know I said that I'm kind of sick of potatoes, but mashed potatoes inside of these cabbage rolls I had today were sooo good). I didn't use savoy cabbage like the recipe I got from Whole Foods asked for (I got some other kind of cabbage that was on sale instead) so wrapping corned beef and mashed potatoes seasoned with egg, salt, and dill didn't go as smoothly as it could have. Cabbage leaves had to be boiled in the potato and corned beef broth beforehand so it was a pretty oily experience working with the cabbage leaves when it came to making the cabbage rolls.

extra cabbage boiled with corned beef and potato broth

 baking the cabbage rolls for about 45 min.

yummy corned beef and cabbage rolls

The good thing is that the cabbage rolls didn't fall apart on my family and me when we ate them. Next time (heh, next year maybe?), I'll be sure to put more beef in each roll because the some of the rolls had more mashed potatoes than corned beef and so the mashed potatoes made these rolls a little bit too hot to hold. Even though the recipe says that it serves 8 people with 16 rolls, the 4 of us managed to finish 10/16 cabbage rolls. It was an awesome meal, and I was way too full by the time I was done eating. Bebe B seemed to like it even though he was grumpy and sleepy; if he didn't like it, he would have definitely spat all the food back out. Luckily, he didn't.

 mint chocolate chip milkshake

My mom bought some mint chocolate chip ice cream because it was on sale the other day so I made mint chocolate chip milkshakes :). It tastes much better and healthier than the McDonald's Shamrock Shake (there's no scary bright green food coloring in my milkshake, thank goodness!) After 2 days of cooking and 4 loads of dishes (today), it was a very successful dinner. I'm just not planning to do some hardcore cooking for a while (meaning maybe about a week or two). Maybe I'll make a salad to post about sometime. Salads are a bit more low maintenance to make and much, much healthier to eat. Okay, well, time for a little night cap with some Irish cream. Ta-ta!

P.S. oh dear, I'm definitely exercising tomorrow.