Pesach Transition Meals

Hello dear readers,

Planning food for pesach can be a lot of effort. One tricky and underrated part of the food planning, though, is the meals right before pesach starts. I can’t be the only one who’s had the experience of koshering my entire kitchen in the days leading up to the seders, only for the kids to say “mom, it’s not pesach yet, can you make spaghetti?” Oy.

Maybe some people go out to a restaurant to eat some last chametz on erev pesach? I can’t remember the last time we did that. Part of it, of course, is the fact that when our entire family gets together, we can be upwards of 25 people, so it would be hard to find a place to accommodate us all. We also have a nice last chametz tradition, which I thought I’d share here.

Our family, so as not to ruin the sparklingly clean and koshered kitchen, dines al fresco! We pack a picnic basket of deli meat, yummy potato salad, fudgy brownies and, of course, the last BREAD for a week: white, whole-wheat, rye, pita and more. We take the food and go to eat outside. We are a three-minute walk to a park, so when we are hosting the seders it’s not too far for me if I need to stay back for a little and do some more, last-minute pre-seder cooking. We take everything disposable, including paper plates and cups but also ketchup packets and disposable serving bowls. Like the original korban pesach, none of the meal is allowed to be left, so we make sandwiches from the leftovers and give them to some people in need. (We also keep a few pieces of bread so we can do bedikat chametz later in the evening.)

The picnic is the first of the pesach transition meals. The second one is the meal in that weird time, after the time when you’re not allowed to eat chametz but before the seder so you’re not allowed to eat matzah. If the previous dinner was sandwich night (tasty and easy, if not the most healthy meal), the erev pesach lunch meal in our house is salad bar! We usually have around 30 (!) different vegetables, and last year we set a record with six different home-made dressings: vinaigrette, Italian, Russian, ranch, oil and lemon, and Caesar. Yum!

This year we are going away to a Passover kosher resort, so we’ll have to see what these two meals look like away from home. I’m sure they’ll be delicious, and I look forward to not having to prepare both of those meals!

More soon,

Ariella

For more information on how you can take your family on a kosher Passover vacation, call Leisure Time Tours at 718-528-0700.