St. Patrick's Day is upon us. It's a holiday that somehow escaped my culinary childhood, and one that I continued to forget to celebrate until recent years. It's not that I have no love for green bagels, green beer, and all foods seasonally green. Well, okay, I don't have love for them. But I don't dislike them, either. They just never seem to show up on my food radar ("foodar?"). But this weekend was the third year in a row that I cooked corned beef and cabbage. I rarely had boiled dinners when was growing up. Gee, I wonder why? But this one has been growing on me. This year, we had a party to celebrate not only this homage to boiling, but we made it a truly international meal. The wild card this year was that two of the guests (20% of all attendees!) were vegetarians. They weren't under the corned beef spell for this one. So I had to split up the menu. Once that happened, all culinary hell broke loose, and I went wildly international with the whole menu. Here it is, with each item's origins included:

Appetizers:
• meat and potato knishes (lower east side. maybe)
• mock chopped liver (lower east side? Berkley, CA? A commune somewhere? who knows?)
• Caesar Salad (Mexico. Really)
• Vegetarian Pad Thai (duh!)
• Corned Beef and Cabbage, w/potatoes and carrots (New York and/or somewhere in Ireland)
• Checkerboard chocolate and vanilla cookies...England

So there you have it. Food from everywhere. And yeah, it turned out well. No one went home hungry.

And what are you making for this big food holiday?