Green Cuisine

My mother loves her holidays; she really does. Halloween would see our house decked out in skeleton cutouts and fake spiderweb gauze. For dinner that eve, we'd slurp her pumpkin soup. Easter would be draped in pastel eggs and chocolates. Christmas... let's just say the number of different cookies she makes could feed entire towns.

We don't have a drop of Irish blood in us, but St. Patrick's Day with mom invariably involved at least one green meal. If it was breakfast, it would be green eggs (and ham!) or green pancakes, in deformed clover shapes no less. Dinners were more challenging-- how would one turn chicken green? I remember corn beef and cabbage a couple years. Mercifully the meat was left it's "natural" color, but nearly everything else was fair game. Mashed potatoes got a few drops of food coloring. Milk was transformed to a bright green, and flavored with a splash of peppermint extract. Dessert? Instant pistachio pudding.

It's been more than a decade since I've spent St. Patrick's Day with my parents, but I still reminisce about our green cuisine each March. Even as a child I knew it was corny, but I loved it. I liked that we could celebrate anything, that it could be so fun and that our food could take on the ungodly hues of frogs and boogers.

Any green in tonight's dinner will come from chlorophyll, not artificial coloring but maybe, just maybe, when Toshi gets older I'll tint his rice or milk a wonderfully hideous green.