…where I have to start cooking, and from the freezer she’s throwing out pork products (long story) that have taken me all year to make/purchase. She’s in a frenzy, cursing and questioning as she plumbs the depths of anonymously wrapped stuff. God help me when she starts to vacuum and straightening up.
Two people, her best friends in fact, are coming at 6 for the Seder.
ETA: I have just given permission to throw everything the fuck out in the packed freezer. Her mission was brutally and swiftly carried out.
ETA2: She just threw out a big hunk of lobster butter. And a terrine. You know hard it it is to smash lobster shells into smithereens for lobster butter…?
Okay, I’m going to need some background here. Were you unaware pork and lobster aren’t kosher? Were you unaware your wife was Jewish when you obtained these products?
Unless your spouse converted religions recently, this situation has an air of inevitability about it.
So… why is she throwing out the lobster and pork for Passover? Unkosher meat is not chametz. Unless it contains breading, flour thickener, or other chametz of course.
Isn’t there some workaround where you can give the chametz to someone else but it stays in your house and then they give it back after Passover?
Being Catholic was so much easier (I was raised Catholic but am an atheist now) - if you do something sufficiently bad, you will go to hell. Most of us got our ticket to hell when we were still in elementary school. After that you don’t have to follow the rules very closely because you’re going to hell anyway.
So, we just moved to a new neighborhood. Our next-door neighbors stopped by last week ago to introduce themselves and brought us some brownies. So when we made banana bread a couple of days later, we thought it would be nice to give them some. We didn’t catch them at home that day or the next, but we finally successfully delivered it last night. Very nice folks, kids around our kid’s age. As it happens, they’re Jewish, and did in fact mention that today is the start of Passover. It occurred to me later that might be a problem, but I was somewhat familiar with kosher dietary laws and figured that a food containing no meat or dairy wouldn’t be a problem. And I knew about the Passover restriction on leavened bread, but banana bread has no yeast, so we’re fine, right? But now I see that it’s got nothing to do with yeast, and that we basically gave them the worst food gift we could, at the worst possible time.
Ah, well. Could they have scarfed it down for breakfast…?
Ah, bread, sweet bread! Went shopping today, holiday ends at sundown, but out of sight out of mind, and I doubt she’ll bitch at the gratin I’ll make she comes home from work. Cake and hard flour to come. Ditto cornstarch. She didn’t know about the cornstarch that’s in confectioner sugar (I myself just thought of that now), so that’s fine. Bought all-purpose flour, Wondra. Can’t wait for pasta. Might crank up the old machine.
For fridge, toted up the losses, not counting leftovers, frozen pasta crap from TJ’s in case of zombie attacks, and miscellaneous pork stuff of varying proportions of fat and seasonings. Some tongue I had cured. So many vendors, trips to get this stuff at all, let alone best prices. A vacuum-packed bunch of foie-gras escaped by hiding behind some frozen peas in the shelf.
:: moving inwards… :: Pig skin. Back fat in thin sheets. Flair (kidney) fat, rendered. Flair fat raw. Caul (lacy) fat, which I was so excited to buy I posted a MPSIMS about it. (I put a call in today for that.) Uncured jowls. Switching animals, duck gizzards.
Gotta buy rice, but she missed a vacuum-packed Arborio package which I saw this week but didn’t tell her about. Carolina, jasmine, bomba, medium-grain. Lucky Sephardim. But it’s a good idea to toss stale rice if you can afford it. de Puy lentils. Navy beans.
She forgot about the beer. Thank God for small favors.
This year, I was prepared to do a Dunkirk, and remove from the freezer 1 pig’s liver, 2 lbs of pork butt (whole), 1 lb of pork belly, 1 lb of ham, 1 lb of pork jowl, 2 lbs of balk fat, 1 lb ball of caul fat, 2 square feet of pork skin, and two quarts of pork stock as close to jelly as 6 hocks gave up their all. Plus 2 nice pork bellies brining in the fridge, and some remnants of double smoked bacon–into a friend’s resaturant refrigerator.
But this time I asked, and for many reasons (some of which are quite profound, in truth), the frenzy is definitely off this year, and a benign out of sight out of mind is in effect.
Plus she bought and proudly states she will use–and I bet her she won’t–a crappy God knows what mayo, because it was there (with matzoh, macaroons, etc) and was only a $1 and it was Kosher for Passover and that’s why.
Just no crepinettes or rillons or pate for a bit. Which reminds me I have a duck pate with foie gras inlay half eaten in the fridge, which has no other meat (an experiment) but 50% pork jowl, and that’s what will be for breakfast, I guess.
It just occurred to me that the reason I made the pork aspic-to-be is I was planning to make some pork pies, and my first hot water doughs. (I got me some suet as well in the freezer, when the Queen comes over). So that’s off.
Would Jesus eat some pork butt that would be eventually defrosted after it had already been defrosted and was thrown* back* in the freezer to save a few bucks about half an hour ago?
Leo, I hope you’re sitting down. There’s something you need to know…
Passover doesn’t end with the end of the Seder. The Seder is a ceremonial meal on the first night of Passover. Some people have another Seder on the second night. But what you should understand is that Passover lasts for SEVEN days. That’s a whole week without chometz. I mean, it’s a week of bringing peanut butter and jelly sammiches on matzo to school (and I’m not joking) with you for lunch.
