What I Made for Dinner: March 29, 2010

Roast chickens with root vegetables and fingerling potatoes, roasted whole artichokes.

It is Passover. So beginning with Night #1 and continuing for the next week, I will do my level best to abstain from eating leavened foods. This little religious observance is a gigantic pain in my pasta- and sandwich-loving ass.

Last night I hosted my first-ever seder, a job my sister usually undertakes.

There was a soup course, which my mother made because her matzo balls are like buttah. Like buttah! Then the chicken et cetera, which no one was really hungry for after all the soup, but everyone politely ate anyway; and then dessert.

Chocolate-dipped dried apricots, homemade coconut macaroons dipped in chocolate, and some fruit jellies for the kiddos.

So: The obvious question is, why bother abstaining from leavened foods this week? I absolutely do not trouble myself about food restrictions the other fifty-one weeks a year. We all know I eat more than my share of bacon. Putting it mildly, I am irreligious. Just a little. Just enough to eat one of these while wearing a micro-mini, getting a horny li'l devil tattoo, drinking a three-olive martini, and gambling away the children's college money.

But this Passover thing is a little different to me. We eat only unleavened bread to remember a time when we lacked choices and freedom and self-determination, lacked even the time it takes for a loaf of bread to rise. It's not such a bad thing to think about, and on the off (remote) chance that my ancestors at some point actually were slaves in the land of Egypt,* I owe them to at least try a week off bread. So, goddammit, I try.




*Not likely. My ancestors were either garment workers or lawyers in the land of New York as far back as anyone cares to remember.