Being somewhat Irish and all, I always feel a bit festive during the St. Patrick’s Day holiday. Not enough to be obnoxious, but enough to take a little pride in my heritage.

So, yesterday, Actor’s Bridge had a picnic at Neuhoff to celebrate the holiday as well as celebrate the birthday of one of the board members. We were tasked with bringing side dishes and desserts so I decided to go all out Irish style. For my side dish, I made some soda bread, which was surprisingly easy (I used the same recipe to make soda bread scones this morning). Everyone seemed to enjoy it and there wasn’t any left over for me to bring home. Always a good sign. For the dessert, I made a peppermint chocolate cake, which was really fun and easy to make. However, knowing now how you make frosting, I’ll probably eat it more conservatively from now on. I used two whole sticks of butter! Ack! But it was scruptuous and we have a nice chunk left over, which I’m counting on Jason to eat over the next few days.

We grilled out and had hamburgers, boca burgers, and hot dogs, on top of all the other dishes people brought. Needless to say, there was enough food for everyone, including the resident dogs of Neuhoff. We also played a few rounds of indoor bocce ball and I have some pictures to prove it, although the lighting wasn’t that great so the pictures aren’t really worth posting. We wrapped up around 5:30 or so and headed to McDougal’s in Hillsboro Village so we could watch the last half of the NCAA basketball game where Vanderbilt won in double overtime. It was pretty exciting even though I don’t really follow basketball.

Some of my ABE friends were going to a housewarming party at 7:30 in East Nashville, so I decided to tag along and try to get rid of more of the peppermint chocolate cake I made. Goodness knows we don’t need all that at our house. In case you’re wondering if I just showed up at a perfect stranger’s house, I did meet the guy a few hours earlier at the ABE picnic. So we weren’t total strangers, just new friends. The house is really stunning. It was built in 1905 and has space galore. I couldn’t believe how high the ceilings were and how open the floorplan was. He should be very proud of his new home and I hope it brings him a lot of good times.

That was about it for the night and I headed home around 9:30pm. All in all, it was a fairly relaxed, but still very enjoyable, St. Patty’s Day.