I Love St. Patrick's Day!

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in feeling like St. Patrick's Day is just so much fun. I don't know why but I've loved and celebrated it to the fullest as far back as I can remember. I gave myself a good giggle posting some old photos like this below on friends' Facebook walls yesterday:

Man, we look like babies! That was six years ago in Atlanta and, as a side note, I love that all of us in that photo are even closer now than we were then. :) 

Anyway, I've always had such fun celebrating St. Patty's and I laugh out loud thinking of certain memories in the past. This year, I decided to take a slightly different and more "adult" approach to celebrating by having a casual Irish dinner party at my apartment. I invited my ladies over last night for some homemade shepherds pie and cabbage with white beans. Irish food isn't exactly the most elegant in nature but I don't care, I completely love rustic 'earthen' food like that. I originally planned to make corned beef and cabbage but Allison told me she doesn't like corned beef, boo! I make a really great quick shepherds pie though so I decided on that only I did the "long" version with homemade mashed potatoes and all. When the girls arrived, I greeted them with prosecco that I'd dyed green which might have been my favorite part of the meal, heehee:

I'm not patting myself on the back but dinner was delicious. For as much as I love food of vastly different variety, sometimes I think I was meant to be a traditional 'meat and potatoes' gal. There's just something about that combo that is so simple, honest and soulful. For an Italian, I think I did a nice job of being Irish for a day:

For dessert, I baked homemade Baileys sugar cookies. Um, they were freaking delicious. As usual, however, my lack of baking skills came into play when I tried to dye the dough green only to have it come out an oddly greenish brown color, hahaha. They may not be attractive but they were so delicious:

I used this recipe on allrecipes.com and took the advice of the reviewers in doubling the amount of Baileys. I also cut the recipe in half since I surely didn't need to bake freaking 48 cookies and it worked like a charm. I very highly recommend this recipe which is awesome since so often you don't really know how certain baked goods will turn out the first time around (or if someone named Valerie Albanese is baking them).

It was such a fun night with my very favorite women. We laughed so hard and talked about everything under the sun. Next thing we knew, it was after midnight and I'm pretty sure we were buzzed off the cookies alone. :-o I hope everyone else had as great of a St. Patty's celebration as we did!