Monday, April 5, 2010

Pesach

Our first Passover (Pesach) was wonderful, despite the fact that both Fiona and I were seriously ill with strep throat. Actually, she was on the mend with several days of antibiotics in her system, but I was on day one and s.i.c.k. Several Motrin and some allergy meds on top of the antibiotics got me well enough to prepare Passover dinner, and I am so glad! We only had one Haggadah which I don't recommend, which we had to pass around to read from. Since Fiona can't read, we had her recite some of the poems and prayers by repeating after me line by line. She also got to open the door for Eliyahu, and of course both girls got to search for the matzah, for which they demand a reward of chocolate egg creams (they got $5 each instead, I didn't have any club soda). Since my Hebrew is pretty much non-existant and I can't pronounce the transliteration, I found a great website which has audio files of several prayers and songs. We sang along to the songs and listened to the prayers. I think the kid's favorite was Dayenu, but I find Eliyahu HaNavi to be the most touchingly beautiful.

On the menu was a collection of recipes from a new kid's cookbook I got Saskia called "Matzah Meals". We started with matzah ball soup, a huge hit. The main course was gifilte fish (big blech from all of us), potato pudding (yummy, a little like hashbrowns) and tsimmes (apples, yams and carrots baked in a brown sugar sauce). For dessert we had fruit compote and peach kugel. The kugel was excellent, we're definitely making that again!

All in all, we had a great time and learned a few things (like I should really use a fireplace match to light the candles!). Following are a few pictures from the beginning of the evening, in reverse order because Blogger does that! and I am too tired to manually switch around the code. Oh, and no worries, that's grape juice in all of our glasses.





3 comments:

Michelle R said...

Thank you for sharing this! Despite the illness, it looks like ceremony. I love to talk to you sometime about the journey that brought you here (you are the 3rd 'uu' friend of mine that has found this same path!).

Christina said...

wow Michelle, that is interesting! We should do coffee sometime and chat! I'd love to catch up with you too.

Anonymous said...

Lovely, Christina! Please continue to share your journey into Judaism with us.