Greens and Guinness

I've never been a big fan of St. Patrick's Day.  I read somewhere that there are two types of people in this world: the type that go out and party on New Year's Eve and the type that stay home in pajamas.  I'm clearly a stay-at-home-in-my-pajamas type.  Big drinking holidays have never really appealed to me.  Also, after you've worked in the hospitality industry for years, and you've had to deal with drunken idiots on holidays like these, being a drunken idiot sort of loses all appeal.  However, one memorable St. Patrick's Day almost 10 years ago, I was a server at a very Irish Catholic steakhouse.  It looked like a throwback from a 70s mafia movie, and I happen to be assigned a private party.  The party was a group of about 15 elderly women and their priest celebrating St. Patrick's Day--and let me tell you--watching 70 year old women get hysterically drunk after doing shots of Jameson with their priest, at 11 am, well that's some crazy, wild living!

Today I woke up with no intentions of celebrating the luck of the Irish.  But, then the weather gave me a change of heart.  This was our first real spring day: 70 degrees and sunny.  I took a photography walk and found the most beautiful shade of green in my cold frame.

  Arugula and spinach and lettuce that overwintered just fine, snuggled under glass surrounded by straw bales.  Then as I was walking, it was apparent that my college town of Bowling Green was reveling in drunken glory.  On short walk down College St. and Wooster St., I saw dozens of undergrad party houses--partiers spilled out on the lawns playing beer pong and cornhole.  It was sort of infectious.

So, I ran to the store and on a last minute whim, grabbed a corned beef brisket.  It was the second to last one in the store.  How's that for lucky?  And I made this for dinner:

And then, magically four pints of Guinness appeared in my fridge overnight...what mischief lepruchan-like husbands get into after I've gone to bed.

So I washed it all down with this:

Not a bad St. Patty's Day for one that doesn't celebrate such things...