And to my Jewish friends, I hope you had a terrific Passover seder....nu, so how come you didn't invite me (said in a true Jewish mother voice)? I was thinking today how much I miss having all my favorite Passover foods. I was raised in a Jewish house and seeing Passover on the calendar makes me recall the fun of cleaning the kitchen, changing to the special dishes, hauling out the Passover pots and pans and utensils, etc. OK well maybe that wasn't really FUN to a pre-teen girl, but I sure feel nostalgic for it now. And the food! Because there is to be no leavening to lighten the food (remember that there is matzo, unleavened bread, that is so flat that it makes a saltine cracker look puffy), the only way to get any height in a cake or similar food is to use eggs. Our household typically went through several dozen eggs just for the first 2 nights! I think my absolute favorite Passover food, hands down, was matzo ball soup. Whether they were light and fluffy or heavy as bricks, I loved matzo balls.

A traditional Passover appetizer item is Gefilte Fish. I never really cared for any type of fish all that much, and this stuff is like a heavy metal version of fish. And I don't mean it rocks! I mean it is like eating a portion of lead, compared to a nice light fish filet. My grandmother used to make her own gefilte fish, and I was blessed to see it from start to finish. Which is another reason I would not eat it.

My grandmother's uncle ran a local fish store a few blocks from home, and we would go to his shop to pick out a nice carp. Yes, carp is the fish of choice for this delicacy! There was a big tank in the front of the store and my grandmother would stare at the fish and select one, then her uncle would "fish" it out of the tank, take it in the back, and I would hear some noises and next thing I knew, we were walking out with a paper-wrapped bundle. When we got home, my grandmother would take out her special Passover grinder, screw it onto the table, put her wooden bowl under it and take this fish and hand crank it through this grinder til it was a gelatinous mess. She added matzo meal (ground matzo crackers) and spices to the mixture, shaped it into small ovals, and would then cook it in a pot with carrots and onions. I could not wrap my small mind around this food, and put up a fuss from a very young age. So I was given my own special appetizer: the Passover version of egg salad, "eggs and schmaltz." Now before you say, "I don't even WANT to know what that is..." trust me that it was better than the gefilte fish! So what exactly WAS eggs and schmaltz? It was, of course, hard boiled eggs, chopped and mixed with a little salt and pepper. But, mayonnaise was off limits, not kosher for Passover back then, so my grandmother would buy a little jar of schmaltz, which is rendered chicken fat. C'mon, I can see you salivating now! It only took a tiny bit to hold the eggs together, and that got me through the appetizer portion of the meal.

The other night I was watching a show on the Food Network called "Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives" and the host, Guy Fieri, was in a deli, and back in the kitchen, the cook was using schmaltz. Guy picked up the little jar and held it up to the camera and described it, with kind of a green look on his face. Hmmm. If only he knew how much that meant to me!

So, today is Easter, which I do celebrate now, having gone over to the other side, religious-wise. With my dysfunctional family unit in full dysfunction, there was no Easter dinner. There was a bit of leftover ham that someone had put in the crock pot on Friday, and my daughter did try to throw something together for the kids. Me, I went to Wendy's and got some things off the value menu; I'm a cheap date!