5/4/96

The Pre-Pessah Cleanout

If we had a matron saint of Pessah preparations, she'd be Old Mother Hubbard.

    Boil down Judaism to one word, and that word has to be "food." Not every Jew believes in God, or goes to shul, and no one observes all 10 commandments -- never mind all 613 mitzvot -- but every one of us is strictly righteous at holiday time when it comes to what we eat.
    The nation's commerce depends on that.
    Every Israeli industry makes a killing once a year, cleaning out its stock of matza meal or candy or kneidlach mix to five million frenzied citizens.
    We in the Orbaum household decided to clean out our stock in the weeks approaching Pessah. We reduced our supermarket purchases to the barest essentials as we tried to eat our way through what we already have. Not only is that economical, my wife reasoned, but it saves having to pack the stuff away for a week, and then unpack and reshelve it all once Pessah is over.
    That's the kind of challenge I can really get gripped by. Give me a job to do, say nobody expects much out of me but do the best I can anyway, and by jove it'll get done. (That's basically why I made triplets.)
    The first step, I figured, was to, er, take stock.
    "Honey?"
    "Yes, dear?"
    "No, I mean 'Honey!' As in, 'why do we need so much honey?' Did you invite Winnie the Pooh for Shabbat?"
    "Leftovers, from Rosh Hashana. We ate so much of the stuff, nobody could face it anymore. So I put it at the back of the cupboard --"
    "-- Behind the case of date spread I got special for Tu Bishvat. Didn't the kids beg me to buy it because they just couldn't get enough?"
     "They got enough."
    "So now we have a complete case minus one tablespoonful. What am I gonna do with it?"
    "Dunno. Chuck it."
    Whoa there. That's the one commandment I do observe religiously: Thou shalt not throw away perfectly good food. We have an understanding in my home: the kids get first dibs, what they leave over we offer the cat, what the cat doesn't want is my supper. You can always find in the fridge little heaps of unrecognizable victuals that have been mixed, mashed, liberally ketchuped and then understandably spurned, and which my wife has strict orders not to throw away because it breaks my heart to waste what Mother Earth has lovingly yielded for us.
    I expected my kids would, in time, learn that it is immoral to make garbage out of sustenance, but what they have learned instead is, if we eat it all up, Daddy will go hungry. (What I have learned is, only buy food for the kids that I myself can stomach.)
    So that's why, the other night, we all sat down to a delicious meal of honeyed date spread patties with marshmallow topping (left over from Lag Ba'Omer) on a bed of lemon wafers (Purim). When I asked the kids what they'd like for dessert, they begged for broccoli.
    I wouldn't say there weren't leftovers, but after I gobbled up the remains I had to be rushed to hospital with a dire case of pancreatic overload. No food went to waste, however, and I'm proud of that.
    Moreover, we had cleared out the back of the third shelf.
    "Do we believe in vampires?" I asked my wife as I was inspecting the spice cabinet.
    "No. Why?"
    "Just wondering why we have eight large containers of garlic powder."
    "That's one for every Pessah we've spent together. If you search very carefully you'll also find eight containers of pepper, paprika, cinammon and parsley."
    "But we use so little of the stuff."
    "Precisely. And every Pessah we buy more."
    "Well, why can't we simply stash it away with the Pessah dishes every year? In our entire lives we'd only have to buy one of each."
    She gasped. "But that wouldn't be kosher!"
    "Sez who?"
    "The rabbis."
    "What rabbis?"
    "The ones on the package, that's why they stamp the year on everything, so we shouldn't use, say, tunafish that's kosher for Passover in 1995, in 1996."
    "What are they afraid of, someone's gonna open the tin, slip some breadcrumbs in and then close it again? Don't you understand, woman? Somebody's making big bucks off us with this scam, and not just the manufacturer."
    Anyway, that's why all of a sudden I began to experiment with super-spicy recipes. There was a fair amount of gastronomic genius involved, such as the Hungarian goulash I invented that called for eight containersful of whatever spices one might have around the house. And as I didn't have any goulash meat on hand (and I certainly wasn't about to go out and buy some), I used the hotdogs we couldn't get through on Independence Day.
    The cat tried the goulash, and barfed.
    I suggested we have some friends over for dinner to help us get through it. "We could tell 'em it's the newest thing, Indian-German-Hungarian-American cuisine."
    I had to eat it. I was almost -- almost -- willing to slip it into the garbage can.
    The miracle of Hanukka is that the oil required to fry one day's latkes can be made to last for eight years. I imagine ours is not the only household with dozens of little peanut butter jars filled with preused oil.
    Think, I thought: how does one use up old oil? Happily, I discovered we still had several boxes of latke mix, and it so happens I love latkes, so it didn't matter if no one else ate it. But after the first batch I noticed the oil was not diminished, so I tried several tricks I picked up over the years, like marinating the pancakes in cold oil overnight, cooking it on the lowest flame possible, and constantly basting it with more oil. Then I boiled up the remaining oil and served it as gravy.
    I will never eat another latke as long as I live.
    I couldn't begin to say what I found in the freezer. I asked the wife.
    "Hmm," she said, studying the iced lumps. "Couldn't say. Maybe it's hamentashen. Or blintzes from Shavuot. As I recall we had company over, we made dozens, they were awful so nobody ate them and you wouldn't let me throw them out so I froze them. Or it could be hamburgers from Yom Ha'atzmaut that fell into the charcoals and you said we could dust them off and they'd still be edible, only nobody would ed them." She shrugged. "Could be anything, really."
    Turned out to be Hanukka candles. We only found this out after we'd popped them in the microwave and dished 'em up to the kiddies. I gave my wife special dispensation to throw them out.
    But why, I wanted to know, did we keep candles in the freezer?
    "That way they don't drip," was the obvious answer.
    The obvious rejoinder was that nobody was suggesting we store them in the oven, and that the pantry would've been a logical place, but having been married lo these many years, I have learned to save my rejoinders for an autobiography.
    I couldn't help myself from asking why, in the middle of March, we should have a box of Hanukka candles at all.
    "Because in every box there's always one missing, or one broken, or one without a wick, so you always have to buy an extra box to get through the holiday, but instead I was saving this box from year to year so that we only have to buy one extra box every 44 years."
    "Makes a great heirloom," I noted without an inkling of sarcasm.
    Funny thing about the freezer. Such a tiny space, and you can never fit anything in it, but the amount it holds is phenomenal. Like the half-dozen mini cheesecakes (Shavuot) I found in the back under the jumbo bag of leaking horseradish (Pessah '91-'95 incl.). I searched through every cookbook I have but could not find any recipe calling for any combination of the two. I won't say how, but the lot of it did disappear.
    That left the freezer pretty much empty except for a tray of ice cubes (we'd have to use them up, too, because I don't believe in wasting water), and my schmaltz collection, and ... and ...
    "Oh, that. A pomegranate. From Rosh Hashana."
    It's an ancient tradition to buy an exotic fruit for the New Year, say a prayer over it and then wonder what the hell to do with it because nobody likes it.
    With a few days to go before Pessah, we were down to nearly nothing. Some dried out dried fruit from Tu Bishvat. A tremendous boxful of unspeakable Purim chazerai we couldn't even unload on the neighborhood scamps. One bag of potato flour that I bought for my wife as a gift for the first Pessah we spent together when we were still dating (it had an expiry date of July 1987); the bag was from then until now untouched by human hands, though it has been enjoyed by 11 generations of a genus of moth. And aluminum foil.
    "Aluminum foil?"
    "We have to use it up, it's marked 'kosher l'Pessah 1995,' which would make it absolutely tref in 1996."
    "Aluminum foil?" I repeated stupidly. "Don't tell me the rabbis go down into the aluminum mines to check that the miners have washed their hands after lunch." Then I had a wild, though not entirely illogical thought. "Do we have to use up all the toilet paper too?"
    "Don't be ridiculous. Have you ever seen a Pessah hechsher on toilet paper?"
    "No, but I'll be sure to start looking."
    The day before Pessah I admired a job well done: Old Mother Hubbard was well-stocked by comparison.
    My wife was impressed. "You checked every shelf, every cupboard?"
    "Yup."
    "Above the fridge, where we keep the vases?"
    "No. Why would I --"
    "Check."
    I did.
    "Oh, God, NO!"
    Matza. A giant economy-sized box so big it comes with handy plastic straps so you can lug it over your back.
    "You'll have to eat it," she said.
    "But I hate matza."
    "Then throw it out."
    "I can't," I whimpered. "You think maybe we could just leave it there and not eat it this Pessah as well?"
    "No, you'll have to get rid of it and go out tomorrow and buy more. But if you're planning to eat it, don't do it in the house, it's already kosher for Pessah and I don't want any matza crumbs."
    A groan emerged from my digestive tract. "Then where?"
    "You can take it out to the balcony," she said with the dirtiest of looks, "and eat it in the succa you haven't taken down yet."