Passover

Passover is essentially a gluten free holiday. With the absence of wheat, rye, barley, spelt, and oats for 8 nights, creates limited choices. Protein and veggies are easy. It’s the carbs, the desserts, actually the stuff that most of us crave, thus find satisfying become absent. What I have found in creating a gluten free household is that mealtime as well as snack time is every bit as tasty, if not tastier than how we previously ate.

For my kids, Passover elicits emotions of dread and doom. However, this past week, as I tested and retested recipes, the kids were quite emotional about what was coming out of our kitchen. Even a failed attempt at a gluten free passover doughnut this morning, were gobbled up. Eli coined it a “makee” – a cross between a muffin and a cake and one of the best gluten free treats to date!

So, in testing recipes for the first night of Seder, I started with this Amaranth, Quinoa and Dark Chocolate Cake from La Tartine Gourmande. The first go around, I made it exactly according to the recipe. Delicious! Perfect! And it disappeared within minutes. But with 14 adults and 9 kids, sitting down to dinner, this wasn’t going to go very far.

Waking up at 5am really worked for me this morning.  I got to Fairfax at 8:15 am, expecting to avoid the long lines and empty shelves typical of pre-Passover.  Apparently, so thought all the other conscientious Jewish hausfraus. 

First, I run into Melissa between the tomatoes and avocados in the vegetable store. We know each other from when our children were in elementary school.  Her cart was already piled full with onions, carrots, celery, etc… each item meticulously checked off on the list in her hand.  Seeing her reminds me of old times, a sweet, sad longing for when our children were young. We hug. I’m a little embarrassed because Melissa, as always, looks beautiful and put together, while I look like a schmata (rag) in an old sweatshirt and sweatpants. 

Decades ago, as a fledging (broke) New York stage actress, I had the good fortune to be befriended by the film producer Robert Chartoff (“Raging Bull,”  “The Right Stuff,”  “Rocky’s I—VI”). We met on the basis of our identical surnames, but traced our ancestry back to different origins.  It seemed our names were accidentally namesake bastardizations of different, multi-syllabic and multi-Slavic monikers of yore, carelessly abbreviated by uncreative Ellis Island officiates.

Having the same name (although it came from different sources) and feeling like we were kin, felt almost like the miraculous time my malfunctioning checking account was so out of balance, it somehow came out balanced to the penny.  Even a broken clock is correct twice a day. How fortunate for me, who’d been thrilled when Robert first put our name in lights and on the big screen with “They Shoot Horses Don’t They.”