St. Patrick's Day 2026

You know we like to get creative with our celebrating.

When planning St. Patrick's Day dinner, I asked my husband for suggestions. Thinking about cabbages, potatoes, he said what sounded good was stuffed cabbage. Mmmm.

At the time, I was listening to an audiobook set in Ireland, and they kept mentioning brown bread. So I figured brown bread would be good and a side of onion roasted potatoes.

As I was looking for a recipe for brown bread, I found one for German Brown Bread, and the creativity light bulb came on. 

So for St. Patrick's Day, we had Hungarian Stuffed Cabbage, German Brown Bread (recipe from The Food Nanny Rescues Dinner Again), Irish roasted potatoes (onion roasted potatoes but with seasonings you would use in Ireland), and Utah lime green jello with whipped topping (because it's green. We did skip the carrot shaving this time).

For dessert we had Shamrock Shakes (adapted from Jordan Page's A Season of Family Meal Plans, volume 1).

Yeah. Creativity is fun when it comes to celebrating. 

 

Lion Dances and Fireworks and Food, Oh My!

Lunar New Year/Chinese New Year was February 17.

Jr. Jr., Jet, and I had already celebrated at the library earlier in the month but on the day, Jet and I went to the mall to see the Lion Dance parade.

Then we watched the fireworks there (usually when we watch them, we watch them from home because it's so close, but this was fun watching them by the fountain in the mall's courtyard). 

We went home and ate Chinese food and remembered to actually do fortune cookies this time. Woohoo.

It was National Cabbage Day on the 17th. Perfect.

 

It was also Random Acts of Kindness Day and the next day, my son found this clip on his backpack.

It says, "Ur Amazing." Awwww. 

Catching Up February 2025 part 2 (more like 3 because my Valentine post fit in with the catching up)

February 17 was President's Day. Jet helped me with the flag picture that day.

It was also National Cabbage Day. I made egg rolls one of the days around that holiday.

 

February 18 was Pluto Day. I watched one of the many episodes of Psych where Gus said, "You heard about Pluto?" The subtitles had it wrong, though.

 

February 19 was Chocolate Mint Day. I had another Peppermint Patty.

February 20 was National Muffin Day. For dinner we had... muffins again. We made all eggless muffins again. Cornbread muffins, blueberry muffins, and raisin bran muffins.

 

February 21 was the Anniversary of The Legend of Zelda. The kids requested Deku Scrub Cheeseball, which I made. Because Nichole is the one who usually sculpts the cheeseballs nowadays, some of the boys were surprised to learn that I was the one who made the original Deku Scrub Cheeseball way back in 2017. Jet helped put the bay leaves on top.

Jet and I haven't had a chance to do as much baking together as we used to. When we do get the chance it's so nice. I've missed it.

He helped me grind wheat one day, which was nice. My big helper. 

Jet also enjoyed making tracks in the snow (when we had snow. We've finally made it to Spring but I'm still blogging about Winter).

Speaking of snow, a few of us made the trek to the Snow Goose Festival in Delta this year. It was so foggy at first that we couldn't even look for the geese in the fields and when we got to the reservoir, we couldn't see anything there, either.

We entertained ourselves while we waited for the fog to lift.

Finally the fog lifted and just like last year, we found out that the geese had landed on the other side of the reservoir. Except that this year they were so far out, we couldn't get a good look or good pictures.

We did get to see a few fly in from time to time but we've had more exciting years. Oh well.

 

The day after the Snow Goose Festival was National Banana Bread Day, February 23, so we had some banana bread Pop Tarts.

It was also National Rationalization Day so Jeremy made something he'd been wanting to make for a long time- bangers and mash. 

That night was a multi-stake fireside with Camille N. Johnson, the Relief Society General President in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A couple friends and I walked to the building where it was being held. I did not get a good picture. There's a better picture of us when we had banana splits back in January.

Bad picture aside, the fireside was really good. I appreciated the things Sister Johnson shared with us. One of the things she shared was that every morning she has her own personal devotional with President Nelson, prophet and president of the Church. She will put on a talk that he has given in the past and will listen to that while she's getting ready. After that, so many sisters in our stake, including me, took that same challenge and started listening to President Nelson every day. It was talked about when we gathered together for the Worldwide Relief Society Devotional and Testimony Meeting a few weeks later. I went with my ministering sisters.

 

February 24 was Tortilla Chip Day so we had tortillas and dip of course.

 

Jeremy's birthday was in February. Jet wanted to put the candles on the cake so he decided how many of each color and placed them. What a sweetie.

Fish Sticks and Cabbages

February 16 was Tartar Sauce Day so we had fish sticks with tartar sauce.

February 17 was National Cabbage Day. We made something I had been wanting to for a while- Hungarian stuffed cabbage. It's been a few years since we made any. Yumm. Because my cooking ability has improved so much in the last few years (thanks to all those food bloggers and shows, etc.), stuffed cabbage seemed pretty simple. I used the same recipe I did before and it was simple enough, just a little time consuming with taking individual leaves off in boiling water, etc. 

But the end result was yummy. I made some French bread to go with it and we had Fanta. Jeremy drank a lot of Fanta on his mission in Hungary.

Gumdrops and Almonds and Cabbage, Oh My.

I was too tired this week to blog about the holidays (or the computer was unavailable) so here's what we missed:

February 15 was National Gumdrop Day. The kids had gumdrops for after school snack. 

February 16 was Pancake Day at IHOP. It was also National Almond Day. I had honey bunches of oats with almonds for breakfast. Jeremy and I had a snack with almonds in it in the middle of the day. I made a broccoli salad with almonds to go with our dinner of chocolate chip pancakes that Jr. made. Thanks, Jr.

February 17 was National Cabbage Day. Mmmm, more Chinese food. I only had one bag of chow mein noodles left so I made less than I normally would and so many of us picked at the chow mein while dinner was being prepared that we ended up with just a small bowlful at dinner. There were plenty of egg rolls, though. Mmm, Chinese food.

February 17 was also Random Acts of Kindness Day. I started watching an episode of "Random Acts" on BYUTV while I was making dinner. It was the episode with The Food Nanny. You know I love The Food Nanny.

There, blogged. Phew.

Random Acts of Cabbage

There was enough cabbage (and egg roll wrappers and other ingredients) left over from Chinese New Year that we made egg rolls again for National Cabbage Day on February 17.

 

That day was also Random Acts of Kindness Day. We played a game where we rolled dice to tell us who in the family we would do an act of service for and what service we would do. There were things like drawing pictures or writing notes and other things like asking someone about their day, giving someone a compliment, and giving someone a piggy back ride. We did a lot of quick service and it was fun.