A pretty good summation of how one, or me anyways, doesn’t really feel that good about spring, when it first arrives, throwing off winter’s covers.
Though we do get to celebrate spring holidays, like Passover & Easter, which I mostly do through food. In fact my understanding of the Passover sedar is that it actually IS the story of the Jews flight from Egypt, though food. Matzoh, the bread of affliction; charoset, the paste made from dates & apples & nuts & sweet Passover wine that is often everyone’s favorite thing on the sedar plate, the mortar that held together the walls Pharoh made my people build; the salt water to dip parsley in, that I somehow made ridiculously salty this year, tears.
It’s hard to enjoy spring and rebirth and all that good stuff, when the leaders of both Israel and the U.S. are crazy people with really bad ideas. In the Haggadah, where it says next year in Israel, I don’t really want to go there, unless there’s serious regime change by this time next year.
I guess we’re doing the best we can.
Twenty people for Passover. Mark and I debated on how to set up the tables and ended up with the usual arrangement of one table in the living room and one in the dining room, although I longed to have the them closer together. And we ate:
- Sweet potato hummus, with lots of veggies and some broken up matzoh to dip in, because I couldn’t find the matzoh crackers anywhere this year;
- Not-chopped liver, that Jane made with Terry’s recipe, that she said had caramelized onions and zucchini in it;
- Hard-boiled eggs (not deviled) topped with herbs and raspberry vinaigrette;
- apple-date-walnut-almond Charoset;
- Spinach kugel – cream cheese and cottage cheese in with the spinach, lots of egg, and matzoh meal;
- Rachel Ray’s (sort of, based on Rachel) matzoh & herb crusted salmon;
- Flourless chocolate cake – I have been making this recipe for at least 15 years;
- Rhubarb-strawberry crisp with matzoh and almond flour crumble. All frozen fruits – the rhubarb I froze last spring so might as well use it up before this year’s comes in, but the strawberries came from the grocery store.
- Rach and I did the shopping Thursday night after work, and got a late start – so we only went to Metcalfe’s and not Costco – which meant I spent a bunch more on the salmon than I could have. And I think I bought more than I should have – 7 pounds, and maybe 5 would’ve been enough. I froze about a pound and a half for a future dinner, and there was enough left to make salmon cakes for Easter brunch.
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Saturday I went to the outdoor market for the first time – Mark went to the very first one last week, but I had to skip to judge National History Day. I came back and made it to yoga, and then did the Costco run, for a few things – like blueberries for a cooking class next week – going to give all my students a jar of the filling to take home. I dropped off the car and biked to Anna’s soccer game.
In the evening the rest of the fam went to Shazam, but I opted for Honor Among Thieves at the North Street Cabaret. I’d never been there before – it’s a nice small music club. I was thinking so this is what the aging of the Boomers has brought us – a room full of old people politely nodding in time to the music – and a few dancers, too. It was really quite pleasant. And since it was billed as their 4/20 show, Andy, the guitar player, said that he was really glad that 4/20 had become marijuana day instead of Hitler’s birthday. Although, Waco, Oklahoma City bombing, (I guess those horrors were actually April 19th), Columbine, Deepwater Horizon, that started on 4/20 but lasted so long – I even did a Gumbo for the Gulf benefit dinner in June. Obviously, weird shit happens around 4/20, which I take as more proof of T.S.’s claim.
On Easter morning, I made the leftover Charoset into buckwheat-date muffins, a really old recipe from Sarah Leah Chase, a Nantucket cookbook author, who I think was supposed to be the next Silver Palate. Only Rach & I ate them though, I think the buckwheat made them too brown for Mark & Anna.
Saturday after the soccer game I had a nice bagel sandwich with cucumber and cheese and almond butter.
And for some reason unbeknownst to me, they were doing a controlled burn at the middle school where the soccer game was. Fortunately it didn’t get really smokey until almost the end of the second half.
And damn, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown was in April, too.