By Hannah Reich Berman

It is said that confession is good for the soul. So let me confess, and then maybe I will feel better about my thought, which is now that Pesach is over, I am delighted to have my house looking normal again.

All last week I sat and waited for a call from House Beautiful or possibly Architectural Digest. There was little doubt in my mind that someone must have passed the word to the editors of those publications about just how stunning my kitchen looked. Initially, my living room, dining room, den, and bedrooms remained as they were before the start of Passover, and it was only the kitchen that had a glorious new look. I had redecorated for the holiday.

The best way to describe the new look I achieved would be to say that I did it in “Early Masking Tape with String Accents.” Unfortunately, I waited in vain, as nobody from either of those magazines called. For that reason, even after Pesach ended, I left the kitchen as it was. By this time there was more to look at, since more than just the kitchen had a new look–it was the entire house.

I speak primarily of the flooring. Forget about ceramic tiles, wood floors with area rugs, or even carpeting. The new look here is wall-to-wall matzah! This may be a difficult concept to visualize unless one has experienced eight days of people eating matzah at every meal–and often in between.

My patience is running thin; I would love to dismantle the kitchen and do away with the new look of my house, so if I don’t hear from someone soon I will have to start the ball rolling by taking pictures and sending them to the magazines. Nobody will be able to resist coming here to see for himself and then reporting on it. Although this is a visual, even those who will not have the pleasure of seeing the pictures should not have trouble imagining it.

The week before last was the most difficult, since that was “prep week.” For anyone not in the know, the translation of prep week is simple. It means cleaning, menu-planning, and then shopping for ingredients. It also means rolling up one’s sleeves and getting started with cooking, baking, and arranging the Seder plate. My plan was to have both Seders at my daughter’s house, so in spite of whatever help I gave, she was stuck with most of the work. For the meal itself, I prepared what she had asked me to make and then I got started on the charoset, which I had promised to make for her and for my other daughters.

Every woman in the world has at least one dish that her family clamors for. I have four such dishes, and one of them happens to be my charoset. Modesty prevents me from claiming that my charoset is the best. But it is! My plan was to use the electric apple-peeler that I had invested in long ago. And then I remembered that I had not had that peeler in years; it had been stored in a carton in my basement and, along with so many other items, was washed away in the floodwaters of Superstorm Sandy. Right after the storm, I hired a few men to clean things up, and these workers did a terrific job. Not only did they rid my basement of two slimy-looking eels, one ugly brown water snake, and a carp large enough to use for gefilte fish, they also dumped out everything else that was down there. (This is by no means a complaint. All of this they did upon my instructions, since I informed them that I had no intention of ever using anything that had shared the dirty, smelly water with the aforementioned creatures.)

Given the fact that the apple-peeler was no more, my best option was to go to my daughter’s home and make the charoset there. My memory is fair to middling; however, I do remember some things, and I was pretty sure that she owned an electric apple-peeler. If not, my plan was to recruit two of my grandchildren to become the peelers! Fortunately for those grandchildren, that was unnecessary. My memory had not failed me, and my daughter did indeed have an electric peeler.

Foolishly, I had also promised to make the marror for my girls. And by the time I realized that this was a mistake on my part, it was too late to back out. A promise is a promise, so I got to work. To be candid, this job did not exactly come under the heading of work. I cheated. A friend had tipped me off by informing me that my favorite supermarket was making freshly ground marror every day. It was being sold in small jars, so into the supermarket I went, where I grabbed a few jars and tossed them into my wagon. I no longer remember how many ounces of horseradish each jar held, but it was certainly not much. It would have been cheaper to buy gold. While I was in the store, I also picked up a very large and very dirty horseradish root that I planned to soak and then cut into three pieces to give to each daughter to be placed on the Seder plate. When I got to the register and discovered how much the jars of the ground stuff cost, I came so close to fainting that I briefly considered opening one jar and taking a whiff to revive myself. But I did not do that. It was too expensive to waste on myself. If I fainted, so be it!

If one has never taken a deep breath in the vicinity of freshly ground horseradish, let me explain that it is a real eye-opener. Next Yom Kippur I plan to ask the produce manager to grind up another little batch so I can take a jar to shul instead of the usual smelling salts. It might not be proper to bring food into shul on a fast day, but my guess is that this is permissible, since this stuff can hardly be considered food. And if anyone should happen to feel faint, it will do the trick! That’s the way it is.

Hannah Berman lives in Woodmere and gives private small-group lessons in mah-jongg and canasta. She can be reached at Savtahannah@aol.com or 516-902-3733.

 

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