Today is a very special day, and not because I’m Irish. March 17 happens to be our wedding anniversary!

This year unbelievably marks our third anniversary! I’m beyond lucky to be married to my best friend and partner in crime dorkiness (see above). Today I’m taking time to look back, reflect, and feel gawl darn grateful that I found the perfect man for me. He’s a smarty pants, makes me laugh with his clever jokes and spot-on impersonations, shares my love of music and British TV shows, has a soft spot for animals, he can fix anything under the sun, and has a knack for picking out the worst movies ever made (but it’s one of the things I love about him!). We’ve watched Napoleon Dynamite approximately 1,322 times together and we laugh like a couple of goofy teenagers every time. He’s a patient and worrywart daddy, who doesn’t bat an eyelash at changing an epic diaper or making a dolly dance and sing in a really high voice. One of the best things about my husband, is that I feel like I can be 100% truly and completely myself. If that isn’t being lucky I don’t know what is!

So how do you thank someone for making you feel like one of the luckiest girls in the world? Well, this year I’m thanking him with ice cream! For the last few years my husband has been looking high and low all over town for green tea ice cream. We finally found it on the menu at a sushi restaurant downtown, not long ago. We savored every bite because finding it in stores has proven to be quite difficult. Now that I finally got my hands on some matcha green tea powder, I knew that I had to make him some homemade green tea ice cream.

Try as I might, my attempts at coming up with my own recipe were disappointingly unfruitful. I knew I wanted it to be dairy free, and I decided coconut milk was the way to go. My trial using arrowroot in place of cornstarch to thicken turned out more like something for Halloween, rather than St. Patrick’s Day. It looked just like a vat of ectoplasm, and it quickly got fed to the garbage disposal before it even made it into the ice cream maker.  Finally I decided to consult some people who know what they are doing when it comes to green tea ice cream, and abandoned my plan to create my own recipe. I went with Minimalist Baker’s super easy recipe for Green Tea Coconut Ice Cream. I have never made a recipe from them that I didn’t love, and this ice cream did not disappoint!

If you love green tea ice cream, or you’re dying to give it a try, I highly recommend their recipe.  It’s sweetened with dates and honey (or maple syrup). The super creamy base is made from coconut and almond milk, and the whole thing is whipped up in the blender, cooled, then churned in an ice cream maker. No cooking sugar and milk over the stove or thickening corn starch until it resembles an unappealing mass of paranormal slime. I had fun making it (and taste-testing) and I can’t wait to share some with my husband this evening.

My husband and I were never really into the typical party-all-day, green-beer scene that takes place on this date, but now we have other things to celebrate. And we most likely will do so with a quiet evening in, enjoying some amazing Thai take-out and an incredibly bad movie. And of course, some fabulous green tea ice cream.

Here’s wishing you much luck and happiness this St. Patrick’s Day!