Green Weekend

You may have heard, but we're having some unseasonably warm weather here in these parts these days (for point of reference, here's last March, March 2009, and March 2008 (though it looks like we had a warm--if not quite-as-warm March 2010).

We hit 74.9 degrees at our house yesterday, and the boys spent the whole day outside (in shorts and tank-tops) jumping their bikes over ramps,

Splitting wood for the evaporator, 

and eating whatever nasty processed meats various visitors provided and drinking cupfuls of sap and almost-syrup. To cleanse their systems, I made Catherine Newman's maple-lemon tofu with brown rice and broccoli, which we ate outside while swatting mosquitoes. Mine did not come out as beautifully golden as hers, but it was yummy (though I do recommend you double the good stuff--you can't have enough sauce on rice). I ate the leftovers cold for "lunch" at 10:30 this morning.

Saturday we celebrated St. Patrick's Day. The Leprechaun visited and left chocolate gold coins in the shoes (he forgot to come Friday night and showed up Saturday morning, before the kids noticed one way or the other, which is an improvement over the tooth fairy who took two days to deliver a gold dollar after Z lost his first tooth last week). He spruced up the nature table while he was at it (the kids could care less about the nature table these days--I feel like such a failure as a psuedo-Waldorf parent).

I was so tired on Saturday after a week of terrible sleep (and probably groggy from the two Benadryl I took the night before in order to try to sleep) that I just wanted to spend the day in bed, but the kids coaxed me into taking them to Lego club, and we had guests invited to spend the afternoon with us. Once our friends arrived, I immediately forgot all about being tired and we had a pleasant afternoon catching up after many months since our last visit. I helped her get started knitting and we cooked up an Irish feast, inspired by a feast created by my friend Raina of the blog Mamacita Spins the Globe: vegetarian Guinness stew (using sweet potatoes in place of the potatoes because we were out of the latter--how not-Irish is that?), Irish soda bread (I use the Joy of Cooking recipe, which has caraway seeds and raisins), grilled cheese sandwiches for my kids who I knew would complain about the mushrooms in the stew (though amazingly they ate the other veggies), Dubliner cheese and brown butter whole wheat shortbread for dessert (again with the Catherine Newman, and I know shortbread is traditionally associated with Scotland, but I've been craving this recipe for a while, besides, why not make it an all-Celtic celebration?).

It only took E and Z about half an hour to warm up to our friends, whom they hadn't seen in a very long time (and girls, no less!). It was fun to see them all playing together.

We listened to Celtic music during dinner and later watched The Secret of Roan Inish, which I love (though Z spent the whole movie saying, "When is this going to be done?"). I had wanted to do some Celtic crafts, or even just some rainbowey-leprechauney crafts, but I never got to it, nor did I ever bring out the Celtic fairy tales book. There just isn't enough time on the weekends, and when the weather's beautiful out, who wants to be inside making crafts?