NJS is doing a St. Patrick's Day meal, but wants some fun yet elegant ideas for starters and desserts. Can you help?

St. Patrick's day is coming up and I wondering if you had any ideas for a St. Patrick's day dinner for a group? St. Patrick's day seems to get wilder and more absurd in the U.S. each year and has basically just turned into one big drinking game. We were really hoping to have a nice dinner party (i.e. no green beer) and many sites seem to go from Valentine's Day meals right into Easter or they just have hokey St. Patrick's day ideas.

We plan on doing corned beef, cabbage, potatoes and carrots. Any ideas for starters or desserts? Ways to liven up the bland traditional meal? More

St. Patrick's Day is coming up, and we've decided to take it (and Meat/Un-Meat Month) as inspiration for A Project. We've always been interested in curing our own meat, and corned beef seems like the perfect place to start. In fact, we've talked about home-curing corned beef a lot, but this year we're really doing it!

There's plenty of time between now and St. Patrick's to cure your own corned beef. Would you like to follow along with us? Here's what you'll need, if you decide to embark on this little project with us. More

Last week I showed you some baby cabbages I bought at the Hollywood Farmers' Market in my post about dropping in on other cities' farmers markets. These little fist-sized gems called out to me so I bought an armful without knowing how I'd cook them. I didn't want to torture them too much, but wanted a warm, comforting dish to go with some grilled pork chops on a rainy night. More

Confession: We had a foodie crush on David Lebovitz long before we saw the tour of his quirky Paris kitchen last week. We've been loving his Guinness-Milk Chocolate Ice Cream for some time now.

The recipe comes from Lebovitz's book The Perfect Scoop, and, like the Guinness Milkshakes from last week, would be a natural for St. Patrick's Day. But we love it as a deeper, more complicated winter alternative to all the crisp vanillas and frosty fruit flavors of summer. The Guinness gives a frothy texture, and the milk chocolate is smooth, sweet, but not so strong that you miss the slightly yeasty taste.

See our finished product and get the recipe below... More

Some of you probably started brining your homemade corned beef days ago. Other enterprising types made a beef and Guinness stew in the slow cooker this morning. But there's still hope for the procrastinators among us, daydreaming about an Irish supper this evening. Here's our St. Patrick's Day menu, which requires nothing more than a quick trip to an average grocery store, and less than an hour to cook: More

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, we probably won't be wearing green. We might not even eat any corned beef and cabbage. But we'll definitely be making tall, frosty Guinness milkshakes. More

Bushmills vs. Jameson. When it comes to this subject, Irish whiskey-drinkers seem to be as divided as the Emerald Isle itself. What is it exactly that makes the preference for one of these iconic brands over another more loaded than, say, a predilection for Pepsi instead of Coke? More

If you're planning to brine your own corned beef in time for St. Patrick's Day, you'll need to gather your ingredients and get started this weekend.

Plan for a few days to gather a good brisket and some pickling spice (We love the pickling spice from Penzeys).

Then you'll need eight days to cure the meat. If you want your corned beef to keep its classic pink color, you'll need order to Insta Cure No. 1 too ... More

TGIF! Here's another suggestion to kick off your St. Patrick's Day celebration: young Irish Cheddar (on sale for $6.99 at Murray's) and Arrogant Ale ($6.99, D'Agostino) from Stone Brewing Company in San Diego.

The ale is aggressive, arrogant even. But that's where the not-to-sharp Irish cheddar cheese, aged six to eight months, jumps in to mellow things out. Both the beer and the cheese have fruity flavors and slight carbonation of the beer lifts the fat of the cheese. More

Walking through a hail storm on St. Patrick's Day Eve has us craving Irish coffee. We're tempted to stop for one at a bar on the way home, but Irish coffee is one of the simplest hot toddies to make at home.

Irish coffee doesn't require any special ingredients and uses only one kind of liquor, often Tulamore Dew Irish whiskey. You might have everything you need to make this treat at home already: hot coffee, sugar or sugar cubes, whiskey, and cream whipped to soft peaks. Here's step-by-step instructions.

Keeping the cream floating neatly on top of the coffee is the one tricky of this drink. We've picked up two tricks for keeping the cream and coffee layers separated: putting sugar in the coffee and using cream close to its expiration date. More