Dreaming of the Emeral Isle...

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland.  My favorite Irish blessing is: "May you be in Heaven half an hour before the Devil knows your dead."

I have some Irish in my blood (a wee bit on my Mother's side), my name literally translates to "Ireland" in Gaelic, and my birthstone is emerald.  Needless to say, I get very excited when March 17th comes around.  I would LOVE to take a trip to Ireland, to learn to speak Gaelic, and to find a real four leaf clover.  At least I have a leprechaun - aka Hubby!

The following project has nothing to do with scrapbooking, but I'm ok with that.  I have been playing around with the idea of doing non-scrapbooking related posts on my blog for a while.  I think this is a good one to start with.

Korie & Frank came over for dinner again, and I wanted to be a little festive.  What better way to celebrate the luck of the Irish than emerald potato pancakes and green beer?

Yes, our food was green.  All it took was food coloring.

I took the basic recipe for potato pancakes and added about a 1/4 tsp of green food coloring gel before mixing everything together.  You could use food coloring liquid, but you have to be careful about the moisture in potato pancakes.  Just a few drops of liquid food coloring in the beer and it is a lovely shade of green.  Korie actually used the gel, but she desolved it slowly in a small amount of beer first, then added it to the cup.

Doesn't it look delicious?  And you could use this same concept with almost any food and with any food coloring.  You can get the basic colors at the supermarket - red, green, blue, yellow - or you could go to a party or craft store and get the funky colors - black, orange, pink, purple, etc.

Have boring vanilla cupcakes?  Put in half a 1 oz bottle of any color food coloring into the batter.  Have plain white icing?  Only a few drops will do you good.  Put food coloring in the water for pasta.  Put food coloring in your clear or amber soda.  Get creative and have fun with it!