One more day of celebrating St. Patrick's Day...why I think I will!

Top of the mornin' to you! Okay so it is the afternoon, but let's not split hairs here. It is gorgeous in DC but I had to spend some time in the kitchen to make my dish for a belated St. Patrick's Day party. So with the theme being Irish, duh!, I was on a quest for some simple and inexpensive to make. There is definitely one thing to be said about Irish food, a lot of the traditional dishes are simple "peasant" food that had to be filling and inexpensive, which works out for me. I actually found my recipe on tastykitchen.com. If anyone has ever read Pioneer Woman you should definitely check out this newest addition to her site that is a place where her readers and friends can share recipes. It was in this member site that I found:

Can you tell why I picked this recipe? Hmmm...Difficulty=Easy and Time=35 minutes, this has my name written all over it. And Calcannon has a very short and approachable list of ingredients: potatoes, kale (or cabbage if you like), onion, whole milk (I used skim to cut some of the calories), unsalted butter, salt and pepper.

And yet with a simple ingredient list I somehow managed to make things difficult for myself. The thing is I have never cleaned, cut, or cooked kale. In the end it was not bad, it was just more work then I had anticipated. And after I had cleaned and chopped all of my kale I wondered about this line in the directions, the 3rd line to be exact:

It says, "to another small pot of water add the chopped kale......". But how was this bowl of kale possibly going to fit into a small pot?

It just didn't make sense. I mean I knew it would wilt, but it was barely fitting in my large pot and here they were telling me to use a SMALL one. But then I saw this cute guy on my bananas and all was right with the world again.

Okay, that was just a complete 180 in topic direction but I seriously saw that monkey while I was corralling all the kale in my pot and I just cracked up. Anyhoo, large pot+a whole lot of kale=perfectly boiled and wilted kale. Everything was going right with the world. It definitely took me longer than 35 minute to get this all together, but it still was easy to pull together. Since I did decide to use skim milk, I added more butter to add a bit more richness. I think next time I would add a bit of sour cream to bring some more creaminess to the dish, but besides all that I think it will be a great contribution for tonight.

After my morning of cooking it was time to enjoy the sunshine. Color has started to come to DC and there is no way you can't feel good with such gorgeousness surrounding you. And now a little picture montage of my neighborhood, enjoy!