Passover Prep, or Blogging as Rebellion

I am being very naughty, leaving sick husband and sick child to fend for themselves in these few minutes, which I am devoting to selfish expression.  I am only rebellious in giant blasts, every decade or so (I think I’m due for one, actually), so small quotidian rebellions are new to me.

And what is the object of my rebellion?  Pictures of my cupboards and refrigerator, testaments to achievement in Jewish housewifery.

During Passover, Jews who are observant in the ways I am observant don’t eat anything made from “chametz” or rye, barley, wheat, spelt and oats.   Many Jews, including me, also refrain from eating corn, rice, lentils and beans.  (Sephardic Jews, meaning Jews originally of Spanish and Portuguese origins, do eat the latter, and non-Sephardic Jews are mad with envy.)  Most of my everyday diet is forbidden to me during Passover.  It makes me exceedingly cross.  I am the opposite of easy going when it comes to food.  I hate being without my fancy-yet-austere chocolates, my recondite teas.  I hate food being harder than normal.  I hate another layer of forbiddenness and craving, even for only 8 days.

The prohibition on chametz extends to owning it, seeing it, and having traces of it in the cracks in your floor, the yucky corners of your car, just about anywhere, so modern observant-in-the-way-that-I-am-observant Jews go into a cleaning frenzy.  There’s a process by which you nullify all the unfound and microscopic chametz in your house, and a Jewish legal procedure that allows us to sell, for the duration of Passover, our chametz to non-Jews, so you can keep it in your house, but you can’t look at it, so you separate your chametz foods from your Passover foods.   But there is still a lot of scrubbing, rearranging, more scrubbing, boiling, oven-cleaning, more scrubbing, etc. required to prepare a Passover kitchen.

One of the biggest challenges is that stove tops and sinks have to be unused (mostly) for 24 hours, between a thorough scrubbing and either extended exposure to flame (stovetops) or a dousing in boiling water (sinks) to be considered kosher for Passover.  Yet one must also feed one’s family during this time.  And of course none of this preparation can be done between Friday night and Saturday night.  And we’re leaving for Bay City early Sunday morning.  So I’m not sure how all this is going to work out, since I have to cook Shabbat dinner on Friday evening.  I can’t leave the scrubbing till Saturday night, because I won’t be home 24 hours later for the heat treatment (and you can’t do this during Passover itself).  I may just use half my burners for Passover and cover the rest of the stovetop with foil.

Passover is like a giant puzzle or obstacle course.  Daniel has no patience for this, since his mother and sister and wife have always put up Passover.  He comes in at the end to cover the counters with foil (yes, we cover our counters, in case there is ghost chametz on them.  Chametz is like cooties — everywhere, just waiting to poison your Passover plates), and wonders what the big deal is.  And then he loudly decries all the families who say “To hell with this,” and just spend the week of Passover in a hotel that’s been made kosher for Passover.  “Passover is about the home!” he says.  Sure, but I don’t see him scrubbing the damn sink.

So anyway, below are: the drawer where all the condiments spend Passover, in hiding.  Mustard, for some reason, is inherently unkosher-for-Passover, so no mustard and no homemade mayonnaise, either.  You can get kosher for Passover mayo, but like most things that try to replicate non k-for-P foods, it is vile.  The best course of action is to eat things like fish and vegetables, which are perfectly fine.   (This is Passover-as-extended-day-spa.)  But no one does that.  We fill our cupboards and mouths and bellies with fake Passover versions of real foods (Passover noodles: just eat a glue stick instead) and are miserable.

Then there is my dazzling refrigerator inside door, waiting for the kosher for Passover cheeses, butter, sour cream, and cream cheese.  We eat so much matzoh with cream cheese that by day 5 the sight of it makes me ill.  Same with eggs.  Then you can see my sparkling and thinned out fridge, full of stuff that we’ll have to either eat or discard by Saturday night.  I don’t think I did a thorough fridge cleaning last year, or else this was a spectacularly dirty year.  Maybe everyone scrubs their every 3 months, or week.  I don’t.

I took pictures of my cupboards, too!  Left to right:  My exceedingly orderly cupboard, which will be closed for Passover, but which looks so tidy since I threw out or composted all the opened, orphaned bags, boxes and whatnot.  See all that pasta on the second shelf?  That’s what we eat 51 weeks a year.  Then excellent kosher wine (not an oxymoron).  Quinoa, which is allowed at Passover and which keeps me going.  I like it year round, but at Passover it’s ambrosia.   Wine and quinoa are especially important to me because they are genuinely good things that are still available during the 8 day diet of weirdness.

I like this little rebellion.  But I will spare you the documentation of kashering and the piece-by-piece narrative of packing for a week in Bay City.

I never watched “30 Rock” anyway

I so completely called this.  Funny how being right doesn’t make me happy.  But that in itself is a great lesson — being right doesn’t always make me happy.

I wanted this to be a very short, pithy post.  A blog haiku — although it’s nothing like a haiku.  But now that I’m here I just want to type and type and type.  I spent 2 1/2 hours cleaning my kitchen for Passover last night, and that’s just the preliminary, not strictly necessary, stuff.  I should photograph the inside of my refrigerator, it looks so spare and gleaming.  My cupboards are models of order.  Every night this week, I need to do a couple of hours of house work, either cleaning (scrubbing, boiling, vacuuming) or packing.   My hands are a mess.  I also need to do a couple of hours of paid-job work, too.  I wonder how any of that is compatible with sleeping and looking after Daniel, who has had a flare up of pancreatitis, and is feeling neglected and petulant — as I would too, if I were in a lot of pain, anxious about the pain, pissed off that my insides had gone rouge, and my spouse was pecking away at the computer keys.

(Oh double sh**t — almost got busted blogging while neglected Daniel and Milo, who happens to have strep throat.  The fact that the NY Times was up on the screen when Daniel walked in is not much better.   See you on the other side of Passover.)

 

I’d rather be blogging

But, over the next three weeks or more, I will likely be doing a lot of other things that will keep me from this venue.  I will traveling for work, preparing for Passover, traveling for Passover, celebrating Passover, and then recovering from Passover.

Not blogging is never good for me, so I will try to post as often as I can, but I’m not optimistic that I’ll be here more than about once a week, if that often.  Please don’t go away.