Starting to get ready

 I am glad that all of you are on the other side of this screen and not here in my dining room with me right now. My husband and i did our big Passover shop at Bingo yesterday. we aren't switching the house over until Sunday. My dining room table is stacked with cartons and boxes of dry Passover goods and my fridge and freezer are simply bursting at the seams. It isn't pretty.

I want to share some of the great things we found at bingo yesterday, and I am not even including the kosher brisket at 6.99/lb.

One of the tasks one often needs to do is to kasher items that one uses during the rest of the year so they are useable for Passover.  I will kasher my parents' sterling flatware and serving pieces. It is lovely to use my parents things on Passover. To kasher metal you need to plunge it into boiling water. At some point during a lull in the cooking I will set a parge pot of water up to boil and then lower silverware  or kiddush cups.in a strainer to the rapidly boiling water and after a few moment i will dump the item to be kashered onto a dish towel. I own enough pots for Passover use. If I I would fill the pot that needed to be kashered with boiling water and then when it reached a rolling boil i would drop in something heavy to cause the water to spill over the sides of the pot, thus making the outside of the pot fit for Passover usage.

Bingo is selling this product, a brick on a stick that you can insert into your boiling bot of water. They also sell special kashering kettles  so you could pour boiling water over the desired object as well as lobster pots with inserts repackaged as kashering pots .No, I didn't buy any of these products. water.

The aisles are labeled. Some are kosher for Passover. Some are Chametz, not kosher for Passover. Others are marked Kitniot whish has food for Jews who eat foods like beans and rice during Passover. My family comes from the part of the world where such foods are NOT EATEN.  I actually have no moral qualms about eating kitniot but that's my family tradition.

I just loved the names of these snacks. It sounds vaguely kinky and I am not asking any questions.

I will be writing about the insane amount of food that I bought in another post .But like a child who eats dessert before the meal i will share some of my favorite things form the toy and religious objects departments.

They were selling Passover themed embroidered couch covers made out of crushed stretch velvet .

We don't allow food beyond our dining room doorway so clearly not something that we need.

They were selling lots of kiddush cups and Seder Plates in "silver" either shiny metal or metalized plastic.

There were so many new Menchie sets to admire.

Purim was just a couple of weeks ago but you can still purchase the playset.

There is now a rival brand to the Menchies, 

I loved the Challah baking set.

And the Gantze- Mishpacha, the whole family set. It helps me anticipate my family sitting at our table.

I have a friend who like me grew up with one foot in the religious world.She collects these. I just take photos.

Once when we were in Brooklyn, my sister ordered a serving of Yapchik, a meat filled potato kugel.

I am not sure what connection the game has with the food but I suppose that the game causes less gastric distress than the edible Yapchik caused my sister.

I make atarot, neckbands for tallitot-- I usually don't use shiny iron on plastic.

We shopped for ourselves and for two other households. We got home. I brought our mountains of groceries  back into the apartment and tried to figure out how to get everything into our freezer and fridge.my husband returned the car to the car rental place.

At ten to seven I looked at my phone and saw a reminder that I was supposed to see Don't Cry for Me My Yeshiva at 7:00 on the Lower East Side. We ran out of the house, without even a stop to put on lipstick and we made it .

The show is essentially a one man show but with two additional actors and a piano performed by my friend and classmate Joe Fox. We were both pretty miserable during our years together--and some for the same reasons and some for completely different reasons. I am so glad that we did the made dash to see the show.  If you can, see this show

Joe's show made me think a whole lot about how a big part of becoming an adult is fixing all of the busted bits of yourself. 

I kept thinking about Joe's words today and the memories that it brought up. I have a tone of stuff to do but i was drawn to a particular task.

About twenty years ago I bought myself a skirt. it was a short black and grey plaid with a leather bound waistband. It was made by Liz Claiborne in the days when she was manufacturing interesting takes on the classics. It wasn't wannabe preppy like Ralph Lauren it was just a cool, new take on the familiar.

I bought the skirt in the days when young New York working women wore short straight skirts, black tights and cool flats, elf boots or Doc Martins to their jobs. You topped the short skit with a big scarf and a boxy coat.

I loved that the skirt was partly New England preppie and slightly punk and a little bit sexy. The skirt was who i wanted to be. When i bought the skirt i could wear it on my thinner days and eventually I couldn't fit into it at all. I have lost some weight and tried the skirt on several months ago and it fit me one again. I loved wearing it. I washed it and discovered that our moth infestation from several years ago had gotten to the skirt. I had the skirt in my either mend or toss pile.

Today I mended it.

I used yarn that I had on hand. Some a black wool and also a variegated blue and grey wool blend. as i stitched I

thought about Joe's words and the memories that they evoked. I think that every time I will wear this skirt it will evoke those same memories of the difficulties of my youth, and Joes and how we have both managed to mend ourselves.

We are both of us imperfect yet functional in this world.

 

and from the Covid Passover five years ago--Israelis singing across their balconies.

Shabbat Shalom!