Adventures in Passover cooking.

Yesterday we switched the house to Passover mode. Each of our new York City based kids showed up with a friend in tow and we got the house switched in three hours.

After my excellent work team left I started the chicken soup and the pickled beet eggs. The soup is the hardest task.I loaded fifteen and a half lbs. of chicken bones into our giant soup pot and then added cut up the vegetables and loaded each vegetable into net soup bags and tied the bags shut. The soup simmered away from last night until four this afternoon.

It was then time to squeeze every bit of goodness out of the net bags of vegetable matter. I pulled each bag out of the soup and applied brute force to it to extract all of the vegetably essence.

I separated the chicken meat from the bones. The bones got squeezed out with all of the meat juices going back into the soup. The cooked chicken bits will be the basis of our meals for the next few days.

The process of extracting all of the goodies from the soup vegetables, and straining the soup took about five hours.

There are now fifteen quarts of soup in my freezer. Six to eight quarts will take us through the two Sedarim.

I also made the briskets today.

I trimmed most of the fat and gristle from the meat. I made a tomato based sauce for the brisket.

and poured it over the meat. I then topped the meat with all of the fat that I had cut off. This will flavor the meat. I save all of the pan juices which will be turned into a gravy. Perhaps tomorrow I will slice up the brisket.

Tomorrow is another adventure at Costco to get more supplies and...more food prep.

Some friends are horrified that I change the house so early. It's the only way I can get all of the preparations done and not either be asleep during Seder or so exhausted and resentful that I would be screaming at my family and guests during the Sedarim.

I am so grateful that my husband cleaned up the mess from all of the soup processing. I suppose I could have done it but I would have been in tears.

The bulbs my building planted in the fall are starting to come up---at least the ones not eaten by the local rodent population

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