St. Patrick’s Day is coming! Remember when you were a kid and you forgot to wear something green to school on St. Patrick’s Day? Kids could pinch you or punch you in the arm. Is this still a thing? And it hurt too, because the boys purposely stuck their knuckle out. Maybe the schools are too paranoid now about violence—oh well, another fun tradition gets watered down.
One tradition that I hope never fades away is Green Eggs and Ham Day at school. It coincides with the birthday of the famous Dr. Seuss on March 2nd, who wrote the classic Green Eggs and Ham. Did you know he wrote it to win a bet with his publisher, who wagered that he couldn’t write a whole story using just 50 unique words? The author did it using 50 simple words that he repeated strategically throughout the poem, not only to create wonderful characters but to also teach a valuable lesson in being open minded and always try new things—even if it’s to eat green eggs! If you haven’t read it in a while, revisit the story this Month of Green; It’s such a wonderful book for simpler times.
This Green Eggs and Ham frittata is from Scattered Thoughts of a Crafty Mom that you can look up if you want. It uses these basic ingredients. The key to this recipe was to use fresh spinach instead of using food coloring for the eggs like many people do—artificial coloring will only give it a blue-green, grayish tint.
Just fill your muffin pan with the pureed spinach and egg mixture to make the egg bites.
Top with cheese and pop them into your toaster oven.
And there you go—Green Eggs and Ham! And what a sneaky way to feed your kids spinach. There was no actual spinach after taste or anything like that. It came out surprisingly vibrant green and it’s a really fun school lunch or grab and go snack for this month.
As long as we’re talking green, did you know that green is the second most favorite color in the world next to blue? And it’s a very close second too. The top 3 are blue, green and red. This probably stems from how it’s so closely associated with nature, growth and tranquility. Psychologically green represents balance and gives us a sense of safety. It calms us and reduces stress and anxiety.
The next green food I wanted to try was to make Mexican Green Rice. Every time I have Mexican food it comes with red rice, and I’m sorry to say I had never heard of green rice. So I wanted to try this Arroz Verde and make it in my rice cooker. I got this recipe from a Food.com recipe submitted by Comfort Cookin. It gets its green color from cilantro and poblano chiles blended into chicken stock. Once that’s made, all you do is add it to long grain rice in your rice cooker and it does the rest.
I found out it’s a very nice alternative to the standard Mexican red rice and it’s tastier too. The chiles give it a subtle kick.
Arroz Verde is a side dish, so we used it with our fajitas for dinner. Fajitas has got to be one of the easiest things to cook—especially when you can get packaged sauce at the market so you all you do is sauté everything. Here is our Arroz Verde con Fajitas.
More green trivia for you. There are roughly 300 to 350 shades of green that the human eye can distinguish. There are actually much more in nature when you factor in the light and shade that provide even more greens in the spectrum. Apparently us humans are more sensitive to green than any other color, which allows us to distinguish more variations.
My daughter, who is a matcha fanatic, would not forgive me if I didn’t do at least one thing matcha for Green Month. So here are Matcha Pancakes (typical Dad recipe) from the guys at TabiEats. No secrets here—all I did was add matcha powder to store-bought Japanese hotcake mix and make matcha syrup according to instructions. You can of course use regular pancake mix but if you haven’t tried Japanese style hotcakes, you should. The result is a cakier, more dessert-like pancake rather than a breakfast one.
Top it off with some anko, or sweet red bean paste. The matcha flavor really comes through, especially with the syrup, and the addition of the anko gives it a distinctly Japanese look.
And now for my last green trick, ha-ha, this was kind of a fail but it was fun trying. I saw on Instagram how a takoyaki pan was used to make candied grapes. They put sugar into the heated pan, dropped some water into each one and waited for the sugar glaze to thicken.
Then all they did was dip a grape on a stick into the glaze after it boiled and started making candied grapes!
The problem with mine was that the candy glaze never hardened completely, so it started to slowly drip off the grape. But it tasted good!
How will you celebrate the greenest month on the calendar, at least in terms of color? Don’t forget, next month is a different kind of green when we celebrate Earth Day.
Products used in this post: Micom Toaster Oven ET-ZLC30, Umami® Micom Rice Cooker & Warmer NL-GAC10/18, Gourmet Sizzler® Electric Griddle EA-DCC10, Takoyaki Plate EA-YBC01
Please note that these recipes were not tested by Zojirushi America
All images by Bert Tanimoto ©2026
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