"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx
I love this stuff:
9×13 pan
8 matzahs
Soak in hot water until soft. Drain but do not squeeze dry.
Beat six eggs and one teaspoon of salt thoroughly
Add 1 cup sugar
1 stick melted margarine
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
Add everything to matzah mixture
Stir in one cup of raisins and four large grated apples
Bake at 350 for 45 minutes
dot tip with margarine.
Miriam is providing a public service by providing a post about Passover brown bag lunches. Click here.
In a short time Pesach will be here again. I am excited about it. It really is one of my favorite holidays but lately it has been quite a struggle for me. I am not really sure why but I have less motivation than normal to try and clean the house of chametz.
I look around the JBlogosphere and I see many posts about the craziness that has enveloped their homes. One story after another in which mothers /wives speak of the challenge of getting the house ready and the fathers/husbands talk about how to keep everyone happy.
Perhaps it is because I am short on caffeine. Or maybe it is something else, but I can’t say that I know exactly what bothers me this year.
On a different tack I can say that I am looking forward to the seders. My son has been working with me on the Four Questions as well as hammering me on the same question from last year.
Abba, tell me why pharoah was bad. Tell me why the plagues happened. Tell me why the Egyptians killed the babies and why G-d killed theirs. Do you think that Moshe is really dead. Does Elijah get a stomach ache from eating all that food?
Whew!
A number of years ago some friends and I played around with creating a Star Wars seder. It was kind of a goofy, nerdy concept but it would have been a lot of fun.
I am still not convinced about kitniyot. This is going to lead back to the age old discussion/comment about picking/choosing what to follow.
Anyhoo I have to get back to reality. Here are a couple of links to other posts I have written about Pesach.
Some Passover Musings
Passover
Here is some creative thinking you don’t see every day.
SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. – It wasn’t your typical fire. When police responded to a report that something smelled of smoke in the middle of the night, they found an old school bus that had been converted into a supersized oven for Passover matzos — complete with a smokestack, exhaust fans and working fire.
A building inspector said that while the bakery bus wasn’t nearly up to code, it was “very creative.”
The derelict red-and-white bus, connected by a plywood passageway to a single-family house, was out of sight of casual passers-by in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood and had apparently escaped the notice of authorities.
Its owner, Rabbi Aaron Winternitz, said Monday he had been making the unleavened bread there for three Passovers and was eager to do the same this year, with Passover coming up in a week.
Winternitz made them for his 50-member Congregation Mivtzar Hatorah. Observant Jews eat matzo during Passover week to illustrate how the Jews had no time to let their bread rise as they fled slavery in Egypt.
He said that the oven-in-a-bus was his invention, and that he purposely bought an old school bus because “school buses are made strong and safe.”
Police Sgt. Lou Scorziello said police traced the smoke to the bus at about 3 a.m. Friday. He said the back door of the bus, formerly the emergency exit, was the oven door. “All the seats had been removed and the whole inside was an oven,” he said.
Off the Broiler caught my eye with two different posts. The first is about Kosher for Pesach coke.
For many of us this isn’t all that much of a novelty, but it grabbed me because it reminded of a post I want to write.
Jews who observe Pesach have to adjust our regular diets to comply with the laws surrounding the holiday. In many homes the seders are well planned, elaborate meals that are a tremendous pleasure to eat. Sometimes the meals that come in between are not so well planned so one finds all sorts of culinary challenges.
Tied into this is the effort made by some in the food industry to create Pesadich food products that resemble their leavened brothers. In recent years I have noticed that they seem to be having more success. The end result is that there is less of a distinction between the two. This begs the question of whether this is a good or bad thing. But like I said that is a post for a different time.
The next post that caught my eye is about the Shamrock Shake. If you have kept Kosher your entire life this might not be of any interest to you whatsoever, but for me it is something that brings back warm memories. My grandfather ZL used to take me to get one of these fabled shakes. Here is the link:
This evening I was forced to head over to the mall. It was not something that I wanted to do. I fought it, I struggled and I did what I could to overcome the unnatural urges of the one ring but alas I am a Numenorean and I did succumb.
Now you know that my visits to the mall are interesting. I say Happy Holidays and once called Santa a fat pedophile so you just need to accept that if you venture out with me I am not afraid to speak my mind.
Not only that but I just might come up with some kind of wacky story and who knows where things go or what can happen then. Speaking of wacky stories and continuing on with the Lord of the Rings theme one day I have to blog about the time when I worked for Gollum. She probably prefers that I refer to her as some kind of supervillain, more Darth Vader like but the reality is that she was much more like the old fish eating cave dweller.
Tonight I armed myself with a hard glare and strode purposefully into Macys. In a short time I was accosted by the makeup and perfume girls who tried to convince me to paint my wife and charm her olfactory system. Ok, the girl didn’t use the word olfactory or system, I did.
She was a tall blonde with a face that was painted on by Dali. Ok, that is not fair either, she wasn’t Dali-like nor did she have three noses or resemble any sort of Picassoish cubism deal. She did have heals that must have been 17 inches in height. I have heard of penis envy but this was stiletto envy, how could the other shoes stand to be near these. They must be so ashamed.
“Try some Essence De Flowers from another place,” she said. I smiled and said that I was trying to quit, but for some reason that went right over her head.
Salesgirl: Your wife will love you if you buy her this.
Me: I bought her a vacuum cleaner. Why does she need this.
Salesgirl: You are so funny. Every woman needs perfume.
Me: What is wrong with taking a bath or shower. Ok, don’t answer that, if she is strong enough to carry a bath away she is more than I can handle.
Salesgirl: This scent is one of my favorites and my mother loves it too.
Me: How old is your mother?
Salesgirl: She is 48. Why do you ask?
Me: Because my wife is 97. Did you ever hear of Martha Raye.
This sent the painted woman into a paroxysm of sputtering and stuttering. It also allowed me to saunter off into the belly of the beast, the mall itself.
As I entered it I could hear a cacophony of Xmas music. BTW, did you know that writing Xmas means that I am antiXtian. I can thank a number of readers for telling me that, but not my dear Lynne Goldberg.
My reverie was broken by the Tmobile man. He was in my face asking me if I needed a cellphone. I said no and he asked if my wife needed one. I tried to stop my response, but I couldn’t help it. I told him that my wife was 97 and asked him if he had ever heard of Martha Raye.
Phoneboy wasn’t fazed by this and wished me a Merry Xmas. I wished him a happy holiday, a warm Kwanza and and cheery pagan holiday. That was a mistake because the anti “Happy Holidays” crew was there and once again I was accosted.
They attacked phoneboy and insisted that he continue to wish people Merry Xmas regardless of whether they looked Xtian or not and then those sharks turned on me.
They gazed upon my semitic features and took my measure. I squinted back at them and asked if someone could start whistling the theme to The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. They encircled me and I knew that soon a fight was going to break out.
A bead of sweat rolled down the corner of my head and a small vein in my forehead popped out. I matched their gaze with my own steely glint and prepared to engage them. Time stood still. Would I be like Bruce Lee in Fists of Fury or something else. I love Bruce but needed something a little lighter so I opted to recreate Robert Stack in Airplane.
You know the scene, he enters the airport and beats up all of the various people asking him for money.
The first man screamed it is not a holiday tree and charged me. I stepped to the side and as he passed by I tripped him and watched him slide into Santa’s playhouse. He was followed by a woman who shrieked that I was killing the baby Jesus. I know better than to hit a woman so I did what any fast thinking man would do. I sprayed her wrists with the Essence De Flowers and pushed her into a shoe store. Last I saw her she was drooling over some Manolo Blahniks.
The next few minutes are a blur. I was like a whirling dervish. I spun to the left and poked the short guy in the ribs with a Snoopy ornament. Lucy and her football smacked another in the nose and then I was hit from behind by The Great Pumpkin.
By this point I was a bloody mess and growing winded. I needed a way to escape. I looked around and saw a mentally disturbed man muttering to himself, pointed at him and shouted “look there goes Pat Robertson.”
The ruse worked and the 700 club ran sheeplike to the leader of their flock leaving me time to exit the mall and return to the safety of my car.
For those of you who are slower than the rest elements of this story have been changed to protect the innocent. That means that some of this is fiction, even if it is poorly written.