Are you sick of Passover posts yet? Well TOO BAD! You can't possibly be as sick of them as I am of the holiday itself. Thank goodness it's over. My first post-Passover meal: a hamburger and fries, plus wheat beer. I feel like wheat beer is an especially good choice, sort of like a two-for-one type thing. I was so full after this meal that I couldn't eat the waffle I'd bought earlier for dessert.
Can I tell you what happens when, in a fit of rage, a person leaves a matzoh ball alone for five hours in a pot from which all the soup has been removed? You get a congealed, dense mass of yellowed grossness, which elicits a "yuck" from Javert. (Unfortunately this is not actually saying much; while Javert is not as picky as, say, Phil, he does think certain things are disgusting, like canned cat food, which I say is just food and probably not even as gross as some canned meats meant for humans.) Anyway, the point is that you get something that even I consider disgusting and let's just be happy I didn't photograph it for you all.
My abandonment of the matzoh ball was my only breakdown during Passover. I don't really know how I managed not to go crazy...Probably it has more to do with not having to go to work for all but 2 days of the holiday than with the food itself. And with the incessant bags of chips and the Turkey Hill Choco Mint Chip ice cream which in my opinion is the best in the world (not ice cream in general, but mint chip specifically). You can't find this ice cream in New York, unfortunately, at least not this flavor. I bought mine at the Shop Rite in Bloomfield, New Jersey, on Saturday night.
Let me tell you something about the Shop Rite in Bloomfield, New Jersey (or maybe it was Clifton?). Its huge. It sells 6 different types of Krazy Glue. There is an entire section devoted to socks. The extremely muscular shopper in front of me in line was purchasing 6 or 8 quart-sized Prego spaghetti sauce containers, the kind that are so big that they come with a handle, and equally large quantities of eggs. He wore a "Department of Homeland Security" tee shirt and he scared me. You know how if you see a cop you suddenly start to act more legally, even if you weren't doing anything illegal before? Rather, I guess you become more aware of the legality of your actions. I certainly did and immediately stopped speaking to Javert lest I say anything vaguely incriminating or offensive to government and get carted away by this dude (who is probably going to come after me due to this post).
The grocery bagger must have noticed the dude as well and asked if he really worked for the DHS. The dude said "Yes" in this deep voice and the bagger looked frightened and said something about "just asking." Then, when it was my turn to check out, the bagger made an unnecessary comment about Jews and Bar Mitzvahs when he saw we were buying Egg Matzoh (my first and last experience with Aviv egg matzoh...blech). His comment, which was a story about his brother or cousin and how he always mispronounces Mazel Tov at Bar Mitzvahs, totally embarrassed the cashier, who told the bagger he hated working with him. I wasn't sure how to interpret it...was the bagger trying to tell Javert and me that he was Jewish and understood why we were buying matzoh? Was he just making a joke? How was I supposed to respond? ("Silly Hebrew, I can't pronounce that either" or "Christian baby's blood sure tastes good"??) Why did this even bother me? Thankfully just as this happened the loudspeaker announced that the store was closing (at 10 pm!) and Javert and I avoided the Jewish issue by making a comment about how glad we were that we lived in New York where stores stay open later. Good thing the suburbs suck so much, they totally saved the day!
Back in the parking lot and invigorated by my successful avoidance of confronting the bagger, I saw the Homeland Security dude loading his giant canisters of spaghetti sauce into his giant SUV. I became momentarily obsessed and wanted to stop and talk to him about his job and ask why he lives in New Jersey and did he hear the Jew comment and why was he buying so much sauce and so many eggs (Easter?) but I'm shy and feared arrest, so I kept quiet and consoled myself by eating ice cream when I got home.
I started this post last week on Wednesday morning and was too busy to finish it till now. Here's a sampling of what last week was like:
It's not even Passover and I've already had a food-related meltdown. It happened last night, around midnight, after I'd been cooking for 6 hours.
I got the turkey after work, but of course D'ag had no other ingredients I needed, including horseradish! What kind of store located on the Upper West Side doesn't carry horseradish the day before Passover? A shitty one, that's what kind. So I had to lug the turkey home and go back out to another supermarket, and to the liquor store to buy a giant bottle of creme de cacao so I could use 1 T for the chocolate souflees for tonight's seder.
I also realized that I hadn't made enough chicken broth, so I bought yet another chicken to suck dry for the sake of soup. I started the soup immediately after I got home. It's not the actual cooking that's hard, its the cleaning and santizing and more cleaning thats involved with raw meat. And since I had to hack up the chicken, there was more santizing to do than usual. But I did it, quite rapidly I might add, and told myself I didn't have to make any more chicken soup for a LONG time.
Then I made the chocolate souffles. These were a lot harder to make than I'd expected, and also need to be frozen until they get baked, which means I had to make even more space in the freezer. Usually I'd get Javert to do this, but he was at a co-op board meeting for our apt. building, so I had to use my best spacial relations skills to maximize freezer capacity. Once I rearranged the freezer I got down to work. You need 6 egg yolks and 8 egg whites for this recipe. This annoyed me. I'd already had to separate eggs the night before last, and ended up having 3 yolks left over (which are now taking up valuable space in the fridge.) So I decided to use 6 egg yolks and only 7 whites, to save an egg. I followed the instructions, otherwise, but at the end I had barely enough batter to fill my 8 ramekins, 4 of which are only 6 oz instead of the recommended 8 oz. Which means I had even less batter than I was supposed to have. I couldn't start over at this point, so I decided to freeze the souffles and try one out after the requisite 3 hours in the freezer, which I calculated would be at midnight.
Then I used part of the newly made chicken broth to make squash soup for tonights seder. At this point Javert came home with 10 chairs borrowed from our neighbors and helped me strain and bag the rest of the soup. I put it in the fridge, since I'll be using it tonight and tomorrow and also have NO MORE ROOM AT ALL in the freezer.
Now here is the disaster part. Javert closed one of the ziplocks and I closed the other, so we don't know who is at fault, or if its the ziplocks themselves. I do know, however, that when I opened the fridge to get the milk out, one of the bags wasn't closed entirely and was leaking. A lot. And when I went to close it, it slipped out from my hands and fell on the floor and soup went everywhere. My newly made, last minute and very necessary soup! Gone!
I screamed for help and Javert cleaned the floor while I cleaned myself, since I too was soaked in soup. And then I kinda lost it, a little bit. I couldn't believe that I'd just spent 4 hours cooking this soup which I really needed and then lost half of it. I was devastated, which in itself is an overreaction, especially when one has a box of storemade chicken broth in one's pantry. For some unknown reason I hadn't used all of the chicken I bought--I'd saved one raw breast--and also hadn't thrown away all the bones I'd used. After much discussion, I decided to use these remnants to make more soup, which I did after eating dinner.
And then comes the real melt-down. I still had the charoset to make, according to my list of what needs to get made when. I don't really know why I decided that I HAD to follow my list even though it was midnight and I was tired. But I did. And I totally pureed it. For those of you who don't know, charoset is NOT supposed to be pureed, its supposed to be more like extra chunky salsa. My charoset looks like vomit. Lavendar colored vomit with little specks of brown it in.
So I had a mental breakdown. Javert had to calm me down, otherwise I'd still be standing over the vomitous charoset (although it tastes fabulous) crying into a dish towel. Mainly he cheered my up by reminding me that we have a box of kleenex in the kitchen. This made me feel much better because I hate dirtying dishtowels.
The only saving grace was the souffle. I had to test one, because if it also got screwed up I was going to have to take drastic measures and totally revamp the seder plan. Luckily it was fine and I had a nice bedtime dessert treat before collapsing into sleep.
And you thought the Kosher-for-Passover stuff tasted bad...
Today at work everyone brought in their chametz (all the food you can't eat or even own on Passover--I don't do this, since I'm too poor to get rid of my chametz and can trust myself not to eat it, thank you very much god) for a sort of pre-Passover food fest. It was a junk food extravaganza in the microwave room, with granola bars and pretzels and candy and chips and cookies....specifically Girl Scout Cookies, and more specifically, THIN MINTS. I stole a box for my coworkers and we spent the day bingeing. Your mouth is watering right now just thinking about it, huh?
I found out about the free food when my boss brought in a box of white chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies for my two coworkers and me to share. They looked promising; they were organic, and preservative-free, and in a very attractive package. I opened the foil wrapper and thought I smelled something weird-- Phil described the smell as "like carpet cleaner." Undeterred, I tried a cookie. BAD DECISION. It tasted like poison. Naturally I made Phil take a bite too, which he promptly spit up into his garbage can. Then I spit into mine, and we made a big show of washing our mouths out with whatever liquid we had on hand (coffee for me, tea for him). Two hours later I still couldn't get the taste of poison out of my mouth.*
Of course this didn't stop us from rummaging through the other food set out. Hence the Girl Scout cookies and pretzels. But it made both of us wonder if our boss or someone else is trying to kill us.
*This makes me think of those "Mr Yuck" stickers. In kindergarten or maybe first grade, I was assigned "homework," which consisted of me having to put Mr. Yuck stickers on 5 of my favorite household poisons. I wish I could say I chose cool ones, but I think I picked shampoo and hydrogen peroxide. Poisonous? Probably. But it would be much cooler to have chosen something really deadly, like roach bait or drano. I guess I wasn't so evil as a little kid after all.
Today I got up at 8:30 so I could go to Fairway and do a big pre-Passover shopping. For those of you who live in New York, I'm talking about Fairway Uptown, in Harlem, not Fairway downtown on the Upper West Side. Everyone drives to Fairway Uptown, and thus buys entire shopping carts of food, which seems really weird to me, since I usually go to the store every day and have to take the subway home, which means not buying more than I can carry. Anyway, Javert and I went to our garage, got out our car, and then drove the .5 miles to Fairway. We then spent 1 hour with the rest of the car-owning Upper Manhattan living Jews buying things like matzoh meal and parsnips for our seders.
Fairway is so great sometimes. They totally expect us Jews to mob the place this weekend, so they put the horseradish root and the parsnips outside, where we'll be sure to see them. I had a nice little incident in the cold room (Fairway Uptown has entire ROOM that is refrigerated. They used to have coats you could borrow, since it gets pretty cold in there, especially if you try shopping without a list.) when a woman asked me where she could find the chicken to make soup out of. I told her that Fairway downtown has chicken bones for sale, but that Uptown rarely did. We then discussed the merits of using an entire chicken for soup versus chicken parts. We definitely disagreed about the two options, but I was in a rush and also didn't want to use up my cold room reserve heating supply arguing over how to make chicken soup. But my way is obviously better. Duh!
The best part about my shopping trip? The free shank bone! I can't remember if it was free or not last year....I do remember cooking it, however, and can recall with disturbing accuracy the absolutely horrific smell that permeated my apartment that afternoon. The bone smelled so bad that the next night during the part of the seder when you're supposed to "point to the shank bone," (or whatever), we pointed to the garbage can, where the shank bone had met its doom. God that thing was nasty! I'm sure this new one will be just as gross, but at least this year I'm prepared.
I didn't end up buying a turkey though, because I noticed kosher turkeys at the supermarket around the corner from my apartment (the evil D'agostino, you may recall). This may be D'ag's one chance to redeem itself. I'll just buy one there on Tuesday, or attempt to and then freak out when they don't have any left.
Javert totally helped me out yesterday by eating a bunch of old crap from the fridge, so now we have room for things like kugel and 6 dozen eggs (not really, more like 4 dozen), and gefilte fish. And he rearranged the freezer, because all my bags of chicken stock had somehow morphed together into one frozen blob that almost took over one entire freezer drawer. He made room in there by eating up all the ice cream.
Another way less interesting article appeared in today's Washington Post. It's about how much some people love matzoh. I don't know who these people are, and I find it kinda hard to believe that that many people would voluntarily choose to eat it. Although maybe if I didn't have to I would too--but doubtful. However, when the article states, "Among 1,000 respondents in a 2004 independent online poll who identified themselves as "non-Jewish," 24 percent had purchased a Manischewitz product. Matzo was at the top of the list," I think we all know what product is probably at the very top of that list. (Hint: It goes into the red mold and is another reason why certain elderly family members prefer the red to the green).
My chicken soup stockpile had an unfortunate casualty last night. I put the soup bags into the freezer while they were still warm and while I was thinking about it, because I'm notorious for forgetting to put perishable foods into the fridge or freezer (this only ever happens to things I've cooked but am not ready to eat yet--like last year's infamous Matzoh Lasagna that I spent all night cooking in preparation for the next night's dinner, and then never got to even taste since it spent the night out on the counter. This was the worst--imagine an already monstrous Emil, craving carbs like crazy, discovering that she's ruined her lasagna when she goes to make coffee in the morning. I think I roared in frustration.) Anyway, I must have put the warm chicken stock bags right next to the chocolate chocolate chip ice cream, because when I got it out to eat for dessert, half of the container was liquid. Luckily I like ice cream soup, but Javert was less than pleased. Too bad for him. I also totally forgot to refrigerate the chicken drumstick I was saving for the cats' breakfast, but surprisingly it was untouched in the morning even though it spent the night on a plate on the stove. Either my cats are idiots, or we've successfully put the fear of god into them regarding jumping on the stove. (Probably the former, since Paxwell continues to attempt to get into the oven when I'm using the broiler.)
As per request, here's the next Countdown To Passover post.
Tonight I made yet another batch of chicken broth. Usually I use kosher chicken bones from Fairway, but this time they were almost totally sold out, so I could only buy one package and had to substitute drumsticks for the second package. I'm getting increasingly concerned about both the quantity and quality of Fairway's kosher meat selection, since I need to buy a big turkey for next week and don't have enough room in my fridge to buy it early--I really hope they don't run out. Also, last time I was in Fairway, on Monday, a bunch of chicken packages were ripped open, which is gross, and the kosher area smelled overwhelmingly of bleach, like they're trying to cover something up.
I also happened to notice this article in the New York Times, which relates to what I wrote yesterday. Apparently I'm not crazy--Rabbis really are lifting restrictions on what we can eat. I never did understand why we can't eat things like corn and rice, I mean it's not like I have a mill and I'm going to grind them into meal or something. Since I'm a total dork, I printed the article and plan to pass it around the table at the seder the second night, to elicit "controversial" opinions from various family and quasi-family members (and maybe start some friendly or even not-so-friendly interfamily fights!). It's not exactly an interpretation of the Hagadah or anything, but it's right up my alley, and since it's MY seder, I can decide what we talk about. And also what we eat.
Which brings me to the next issue. My grandmother always serves a jello mold at every holiday meal held at her apartment or my parent's house--either a lemon/lime mold made with cool whip, which we call--get ready--green mold, or a cherry/raspberry mold with bing cherries and pineapples suspended in it, which we call red mold (much less disgusting sounding, but much, much more disgusting looking). As much as I am the domestic housewife type, I think jello mold is just a little too retro for me. But I know if I don't serve it, my entire family's going to be asking "where's the mold?" and "why didn't you make a mold?," especially my grandmother, in her best guilt-tripping Jewish grandmother voice. So I'm going to make it. I just can't decide which one. I might be able to shock Javert's family with the green mold, but it is sort of an acquired taste...plus the red mold goes well with turkey, since its sort of similar to cranberry sauce (although much sweeter). On the other hand, I made the red mold last year, so maybe it's time for a change. I'll definitely keep you informed about this very important decision.
In totally unrelated news, my upstairs neighbor was having VERY loud sex as I was writing this post. What an excellent soundtrack for Pesach ramblings!
For the second night of Pesach next week, Javert and I invited my parents, my uncle, my grandmother, my brother, Javert's parents, sister, sister's boyfriend, brother, and the CSL. This is one person less than we had last year (we'll miss you Steph!). And this is basically the most people we can fit into our apartment and still have a reasonably coherent seder.* I'm very excited and can't wait to start cooking! (Actually I've already started stockpiling and have amassed 6 bags of frozen chicken broth in my freezer so far--last year I made about 15 qt of soup in one day, which I do not wish to repeat this year, so small increments is the way to go. One of the batches looks exceptionally like urine.)
As I did last year, I instructed my mother to bring the Tulkoff horseradish, since I think it's only sold in Baltimore. Here stores seem to carry only Gold's brand, which I think is highly inferior. So what does my mother do? She goes and buys Gold's brand in Baltimore! Luckily she mentioned this to me on the phone last night so I was able to impart to her exactly how important the correct type of horseradish is. She claimed all the stores in Baltimore were out of it, but I didn't believe her. As I suspected, today she managed to find some non-kosher for Passover Tulkoff horseradish (red, not white, which is WAY too spicy) and she bought two bottles. I hope no one at the seder gets annoyed that its not labeled kosher-for-passover, but I haven't paid attention to kosher-for-Passover product labeling ever since I found corn syrup in the ingredient list for a certified kosher-for-Passover product (ring jells, I think) along with an explanation that Rabbis had decided that this was still okay to certify (I swear I'm not making this up! What a racket!)
Which brings me to what I can assure you will be only the first in a series of Passover Food rants. I am not looking forward to Passover. I love the foods we eat at the seder...but 8 days of limited carbohydrates is enough to drive me insane. Really. You can ask Javert, I turn into a maniac around the 4th day of Passover, and have spontaneous crying fits or worse, and I just can't handle not getting to eat what I want to eat. I'm not a bread or pasta person really, but then you eliminate rice and corn also (this is the dumbest rule EVER) and I can't take it anymore and I lose control.
I'm going to try really hard not to let that happen this year. I like the foods I make for the seder, so I'm just going to make more of them during the rest of the holiday. So what if the kugel has a half a cup of oil in it--it tastes good and it satisfies my carb lust. I've refrained from making egg salad since last Passover so I can look forward to it for this year. I'm not even making brisket for the seder, mostly so I can enjoy it later on in the week and not share it with anyone (and also because kosher briskets cost like 100 dollars if you want enough for 12 people). And for when the carb lust gets out of control? Unlimited quantities of UTZ potato chips, I promise.
But be prepared, people! My little plan, which sounds great now, is certainly not foolproof. I'm sure to break down at least once, and when I do, you probably want to be far far away from me. You should probably start preparing your emergency readiness kits now, just to be safe. *I have more to say about the seder re: who's coming and what that means, but I'll wait till closer, to get myself even MORE excited (or frightened, as you will learn).
