Just a little bit of extra drama

Preparing for Passover is always a physical challenge. Changing the house over, cleaning the house, getting food for 20 dinners to fit into a not very large fridge...

This year came with some additional challenges. My older son who is usually my partner in my Passover prep labors has a full-time job and has to be up by 5:30 am and has to go to sleep early. I miss both the actual help and the companionable company while working like crazy.

Getting all of the prep done on my own is doable although less enjoyable without the company of my usual partner in this endeavor. The real challenge this year has been our fridge which has been behaving like a cranky adolescent working only in spurts and only when it feels like it and never up to full capacity.  To be honest none of my three kids were ever behaviorally as awful as my fridge. 

Last week after the repairman had left I thought the fridge was back to its usual well-behaved self. I went to Moishe's in Brooklyn (expansive, not expensive) with my neighbor and filled my pristine freezer with meat.

Saturday night we switched over the house to Passover mode. I put the chicken soup up to simmer before I went to sleep.

I woke up Sunday morning opened up my beautiful clean freezer and found the bottom of the freezer covered in beef blood.  It really did look like a murder scene.

I cooked all of the meat and asked my across the hall neighbor to store my cooked meat in her freezer. 

Thanks to friends, I have Passover food both raw and cooked stashed away all over my building. No, this is not fun.

I kept my soup simmering away from Saturday night until yesterday because I just couldn't figure out where to stash it.

After finding a spot to store the strained soup (in the freezer in the basement)0 i worked on straining and re-straining the soup. We have just under five gallons of soup lined up in the basement freezer that my husband had scrubbed down and lined in anticipation of the soup.

In the virtually cooking together department, my friend Miriam, whose mother and my mother go way back, discussed making candied orange peel

Usually by this time of year oranges are nasty. But I have been buying beautiful oranges with lovely thick lush peels. I have been candying the citrus peels left over from cooking. 

They are so delicious ( boil peels with equal amounts of sugar and water, boil until the peels are translucent, lay out to dry and then coat with sugar)

I realized last night that the jellied fruit slices are attempting to capture what candied citrus peels are.

My husband suggested that we do a head to head taste test. He and my son in law are giant fans of both jelly fruit slices and canned jellied cranberry sauce.  Both are men with exceptionally good taste, with the same glaring exceptions.

The business with my fridge has left me both frantic and depressed. I did get a call this morning that cheered me up. The repairman will be returning on Friday with a new compressor for our fridge. Hopefully, we can serve Seder dinner without running all over our building to retrieve all of the elements of our meal. i have already put together a spreadsheet for where all of the elements of the meal are hiding.