A Quiet St. Patrick’s Day at Parkside

St. Patrick’s Day feels a little different this year.

Usually our table is full – daughters and their partners, grandkids, laughter, second helpings, and the cheerful chaos that comes with family gatherings. This year, though, the holiday falls midweek and we’re hours away from the closest of our crew. So tonight it’s just Rick and me at Parkside.

Still, the traditions continue.

This afternoon the kitchen smells like every St. Patrick’s Day I can remember: soda bread cooling on the counter and corned beef slowly braising in the oven. Our version of the holiday has never been centered on drinking. Instead, it’s always been about gathering around a true Irish-American feast – glazed corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and soda bread dotted with raisins and cranberries.

Tomorrow morning will bring one of our favorite day-after-St-Pat’s traditions to our breakfast table: Irish Benedict. If you’ve never tried one, you should. Toasted soda bread topped with melted Dubliner cheddar, fresh peppery rocket (arugula), sliced corned beef, a perfectly poached egg, and hollandaise. It’s the sort of breakfast that feels like a celebration all by itself. (I’m hoping to have the recipe up on my food blog soon.)

At the center of our St Patrick’s Day table every year sits a small porcelain figurine of a young woman in a long green Victorian gown, carrying a basket of flowers.

I’ve had her since I was a teenager, when I found her abandoned, tucked away in my parents’ basement in an old shoebox, wrapped in brittle, yellowing newspaper. I thought she was lovely.

When I asked my mom about her, she told me the figurine had belonged to my grandmother – or possibly my great-grandmother – and that when my parents moved into the house twenty-some years earlier, the box had simply never been unpacked.

I rescued her that day; and she’s had a place on our St. Patrick’s Day table ever since.

Some traditions are big and loud. Others are small and quiet – like a loaf of soda bread cooling on the counter, a pot gently simmering on the stove, or a little porcelain figure that reminds you where you came from.

However you’re celebrating today, we wish you a warm and happy St. Patrick’s Day. ☘️