When I last discussed this monumental process, the three moms had just decided on menus. One might think that this is easy, and in some years it is not that hard. You have two Seders. You make a lot of food and eat it both nights. In many ways we are doing that, with minor changes. However, this year a wrench is thrown into the gears because Passover begins Saturday night right after Shabbat. This means that we cannot do any preparation at all the entire day before, but our houses have to be “kosher for Passover” before Shabbat. So the 2 Seder menus just went up to three menus, including Friday night Shabbat dinner.
The three families will each dinner on Friday at one house, lunch Saturday afternoon at another and then all descend upon our house for the first Seder on Saturday night. One final wrench is that you really cannot start the Seder until after sundown on Saturday night with is around 8:15. Way too late for dinner with kids. So we are introducing an innovation, and eating the meal before the Seder and at the “meal” during the Seder we will have dessert. Here is a PDF of our basic menu.
Yesterday Marsha and the moms met again to discuss shopping and what we will need. As we are all hosting these Seders together we are sharing the costs. For example, we know that we need a minimum of 15 dozen eggs. Eggs are a major staple of passover cooking and thank God the holiday is only one week long. We will be making 200 Matza balls. That equals 5 1/2 dozen eggs right there. You get the idea. By the end of this week much of the shopping will be done.
To bring us to today, on Sunday mkm and I defrosted and cleaned the large freezer in the basement and we are now emptying out our main freezer in the kitchen and relocating the food downstairs. Half of the large freezer will be dedicated to passover foods while the rest holds are every day stuff. We also cleaned out mkm’s grandmothers fridge which is also downstairs to hold the every day fridge stuff that needs relocating. Tonight we will remove everything from the kitchen fridge and freezer, the pantry and the counters so the woman who cleans our house every other week will do a more thorough cleaning in the kitchen on Wednesday. Thursday night, the dads will convene at our house to bring upstairs all the Passover supplies (pots, pans, dishes etc.) and put away all the every day stuff.
This then brings us to this coming Shabbat. Cooking is going to occur Saturday night and Sunday, and I will post part three of Passover prep on Monday.
ought I was a super-planner! Phil, this sounds like a TON of work! I hope MKM has lots of help…
There is a very famous Yiddish expression, Shvertz azayan Yid which means its hard to be a Jew. One could write a doctoral thesis on that one phrase, but suffice it to say, we get by with a LOT of help from our friends!