St. Patrick's Day: Grilling Foods

It is that time of year again! St. Patrick's Day. You want to celebrate, have fun with your family and eat some delicious foods. Break out the green beer, tease your kids with green soda by adding food coloring and tell them the leprechaun left it for them, grill your corned beef, cabbage, carrots, onions and potatoes.

To make your dining even more festive you can buy green paper plates and napkins with or without a pattern that is associated with St. Patty's Day. Add a few green and white helium balloons and you and your family are ready to feel the luck of the Irish. You can choose to dress up your dinner table with a cloth tablecloth and a lovely green St. Patty's Day decoration.

While you are waiting for your grill to fire up to the temperature you need for your corned beef, cabbage, carrots, onion and potatoes in a foil pan, you and your child(ren) can make fun St. Patty's Day hats out of construction paper. To do so you will need:

Green, black, yellow and orange construction paper

Scissors

Glue

Draw a hat on green construction paper that looks like a leprachaun would wear that will be big enough to sit atop your child's head. Let your child cut the hat out. While your child is cutting out the hat you can cut out a black strip that will be right above the base of the hat. You will cut a small square out of the yellow construction paper. Make sure you cut it out in the middle so that it is like a belt buckle. Now you can thread the black strip through the square. Let your child glue all of the items onto his/her hat.

Next you want to draw and let your child cut out a beard with sideburns out of the orange construction paper. You can show your child how to make fringes on the orange beard. Once this is completed, the beard/sideburns can be glued to the hat. Once it is dry your child can wear it around the house for fun. (Use a stapler for quicker fun.)

As the food is still on the grill, you can bake a fun green cake. Use a white cake mix and once the ingredients are mixed up, take a small bowl of the cake batter and add green food coloring. The remaining white cake batter pour into a cake pan. Now slowly pour the green cake batter into the cake pan. Use a knife to swirl the green batter around so you will have a white and green marble cake. While the St. Patty's cake is baking you can make frosting or simply use a can of frosting. Add green food coloring to the frosting. Once the cake is cooled you can add the green frosting. If you have frosting gel you can draw a shamrock on top of the cake.

Enjoy a wonderful St. Patrick's Day with your family with a craft project and a delicious meal.