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Monday, April 02, 2007

Happy Passover


I’m afraid the Passover chocolate/mocha sponge cake was a bit too cloying to be enjoyable to anyone but my two year old son. It wasn’t that attractive either. It was very, very “eggy.” Not my sort of thing at all (I never liked custard pies for the same reason), but tomorrow I’m making macaroons which I already know I like. I’m going to skip posting the recipe for this as I really wouldn’t want to be responsible for anyone trying it.

I understand that cakes for this holiday are destined to be a bit heavy as the matzo cake flour and potato starch do not lend themselves to light and airy cakes-but this was outright gross.

Still no tablecloth this year as I do not quite trust Danny to leave it alone. Today was the first day that he ate all three meals sitting in a regular chair at the table. He’s tall and doesn’t have trouble reaching, and lifting him up to the highchair was killing my back anyway. Believe me, it is a very nice milestone. He can drink from a regular glass now as well, though there was no way I would let him have a glass of grape juice sitting on beige silk upholstery. Hey, I’m not stupid.

It’s strange, how the more my illness progresses, and the less able I am to eat without becoming sick-the more I enjoy and value my time spent cooking. Please, don’t write-in to offer psychiatric assessments. It isn’t a martyr thing of “oh, look how I still cook for my family” because if I didn’t feel like cooking-I wouldn’t. My spouse is perfectly capable of cooking and is in fact, pretty talented. Rather, I really do find it an enjoyable hobby and it is one of the few things I am still able to do. The beauty of preparing food is that it can be done a small bit at a time. Learning to dice an onion, go sit down, check the laundry, peel a carrot, go sit down, etc. was a big step in time management for me. I can understand why people have a difficult time preparing a meal after work-trying to do everything at once, and keep up with the dishes would be horribly exhausting.

I do have some valuable advice regarding Passover. Keep a second bottle of kosher wine in the refrigerator. It is only 11% alcohol by volume and makes a terrific “spritzer” with seltzer water. Sure, you can cook with it (1 cup concord grape wine and a bottle of prepared chilli sauce tossed over a beef brisket and cooked slowly at a low temperature is just about the best treatment you can give a tough cut of beef. It works well on beef ribs and chuck roast as well) but contrary to popular belief, it may be consumed as a drink.

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