Mmm, Mmm Good

Here are some of the fantastical feasts we've had in the last month:

St. Patrick's Day we made this Beef Irish Stew and Colcannon w/ham.  My friend, Mandy, made the best Irish Soda Bread and 2 Apple-Ginger pies.   Sadly, the only thing I remembered to take a picture of was the stew!

Next I made french macarons for my sister's birthday.  They turned out great!  I had some flops too, but they tasted good.  We had those for snacks at our St. Patrick's Day party.  I used about 4 different recipes for these, so I'm not going to post any links because it's just too difficult to tell you what I used from each one.  I will say that some people say to be very careful not to over fold the egg whites.  However, I found that once I beat them into total submission they worked better!

I made the Chicken Pomodoro for dinner, but felt I really wanted more to go with the meal but not pasta.  I put it on a bed of spinach - it was amazing!!!

I found a recipe for Bourbon Chicken on Macaroni and Cheesecake's blog.  I really like it at the mall, but this is even more amazing when it's homemade and fresh!  Serve on rice - yummers!

Now for my ever-famous, authentic Italian pasta salad.  I take this to almost all of my dish to pass events.  It's so good!  This is from a beautiful cookbook with tons of pictures of Italy that my parents bought when I was young called: Italy and Its Cuisine by Jillian Stewart from Mallard Press.

Here's the recipe:

Pasta Salad
Serves 6
4 cups cooked red kidney beans, drained
3 cups pasta shells or spirals, cooked
1 large green pepper, seeded and chopped
1 large red pepper, seeded and chopped
20-30 pitted black olives, sliced in half
1 tbsp. capers
4-5 sprigs fresh parsley, chopped
Dressing:
1 cup olive oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 1/2 tsp. finely chopped fresh basil leaves
1 1/4 tsps. salt
1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

Combine the beans, pasta, peppers, olives, capers and parsley in a large bowl.  Mix all the dressing ingredients together; add to the salad ingredients and toss together.  Mangia, Mangia!

This is a really quick lunch and makes you come running back for more:  I saw this in the April edition of Martha Stewart's Living Magazine.  Basically it's fresh Italian bread, ricotta cheese spread on it, fresh baby spinach leaves and a couple of proscuitto slices.  Enjoy!

Here are the Asian Cabbage Rolls.  I didn't have any mushrooms, so I substitued chopped carrots.  They were very tasty.

Finally, for Easter we had our 2nd Annual Easter Egg hunt with baby lambs in attendance.  Everyone invited brought something.  My contribution were these chocolate crosses as favors and an egg-shaped coconut-almond cake with cream cheese frosting.  I made some chocolate flowers for the top along with green colored coconut for the "grass" bedding.