Festive Learning

After four solid days of festive meals, we are feeling joyful and lethargic all at the same time.  Last Thursday was Maundy, with a “light supper” and communion at church.  “Light supper” means a hearty chicken soup with really thick noodles, and breads from around the world.  Since that was my last chance to eat bread for a while, I really loaded up.  Yeast bread with butter is as good as candy, especially when you know you have to switch to unleavened for the next seven days.

Friday during the day I attempted to fast in recognition of Good Friday, since I could not go to Tenebrae that evening.  I learned that it is not advisable to prepare tax returns while fasting.  One should not be rendering unto Caesar while fasting unto God.  I was actually doing Older Daughter’s tax return, and ran into snafus that frustrated me enough that I decided to end my fast around two o’clock.

Seder plate

Friday evening for the first time in forever we went to someone else’s house for the first night Seder.   It was lovely, and we learned about some different traditions.  I had never heard of Miriam’s Cup, which is a ritual to honor women.

Saturday evening we went to the second-night seder at our synagogue.   It was lovely, and I learned even more.  I learned that “Chad Gadya” is a very violent song with animals slaughtering each other, and fire, and the Angel of Death.  I figured it is a children’s song, but a friend just mentioned that it is a political commentary.  I will need to investigate and learn more!

 

CHM avec Easter bonnet and hyacinth, which I
will NOT put outside where the attack
rabbits can get at it.

Today in the morning we praised God for the Resurrection Miracle.  I wore my Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it.  Then home for more cooking.   Jesus was a good Jewish boy so I think he would approve of yet another celebration with food.  No Passover ham this time, but roast beast.

Easter Dinner menu

Pot roast with carrots and celery

Oven-broasted Brussels sprouts

Roasted beets

Potato kugel

Apple-raisin matzo kugel

Passover bagels

Passover Lemon Squares

I asked Youngest Daughter to help me with the cooking, but she would not cook the Brussels sprouts or the beets.  I learned that I should NOT put Brussels sprouts in the oven and then go read my book.  I like to cook the loose Brussels sprout leaves separately because they make a delicious snack, but I forgot that they only take a few minutes to cook.  After a few chapters of reading my book* in the bedroom, I detected a certain smell coming from downstairs.  The leaves were completely charred.  The Brussels sprouts themselves were okay, if a bit black. 

YD made Passover bagels and Passover lemon squares all by herself (she was hungry, I guess). AND she did the dishes.  We had a wonderful quiet low-key meal, just the three of us. 

YD, experiencing celebration exhaustion.  And this
was only on Friday!

Whew.

Did you celebrate anything in the past few days?

*Barbara Pym!

Spring in Earnest

Today spring began in earnest here, with plants and flowers bursting forth from the earth, and warm sun to cheer us all.  

    

However, I myself seem to be lacking enough energy to write.  Chalk it up to too many religious services, I guess.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to recognize and celebrate God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm, both in providing the exodus from Egypt (or escape from Emperor Palpatine, if you prefer) and Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  

So instead of prose, I’ll just provide you with photos of flowers.  Most of these are inside flowers.  I wanted to take more photos outside, but some scofflaw in her pajamas was walking her dog without a leash, so I had to run inside.

This evening I expressed my profound gratitude to my husband by saying tenderly, "I'm glad you don't take your dog for a walk without a leash in your pajamas."  He replied, "What would a dog be doing in my pajamas?"

Bulbs to plant - a gift from a dear friend last week.

Daffodils, bowed over by stormy weather

Bunch of beauteous bulbs

A week later, these tulips are gorgeously in bloom.
I am enjoying them so much!

The hyacinth worships the box of matzo.

Proof of Spring, Inside

And now photographs of spring indoors.

- Still life of Apple Pie with Milk -

Maybe this is not strictly related to spring but it is a sign
of joy anyway because my Mom felt active enough to
make this pie with Youngest Daughter.

Setting up to dye Easter eggs.

Not a happy bunny. That's YD giving me her best evil eye.

We dyed 30 eggs in all.

A ritual of spring: serving gefilte fish.  Extra points for
having the nerve to serve it right next to the ham salad.

See, it was intentional!

Easter Dinner - A Good Square Meal

Happy Easter!

I went to the sunrise service at my church yesterday. It's been a long time since I was able to do this.  It was a gift from God.  The weather was chilly but sunny, and warmth was added by cheerful friends, great music, and the promise of new life that Easter holds.  It's not often we get to hold a worship service outside, and not often we are together at that time of the day.  Thank you, worship leaders and musicians!

The apartment building opposite the church patio, complete with sun rising over the trees.

And then after the service - breakfast!  Thanks to some marvelously industrious folks who got up a lot earlier than I did, we had egg-sausage casserole, fruit compote, ham, and muffins. Plus the theologically-required coffee and tea.  Thank you, cooks!  I enjoyed it immensely.

In fact, it's been practically non-stop eating since Friday.  Saturday evening we went to a second Passover seder at a friend's house.  Yum! Sunday night for our Easter Dinner it was a big change from last year.  No Passover Ham this time.  Instead we had leftover beef brisket from Friday and some newly cooked food.  Looking at the dinner, I discovered an interesting geometric theme.  

Potato kugel

Apple Matzo kugel

Matzo

Apple Matzo Kugel squares

Potato kugel squares

Passover Lemon Squares

The Easter Dinner table.  Much less fancy than the past two nights!

And now I won't be cooking anything, no matter what shape it is, for several days.

The Sacrificial Passover Ham

While I was with my parents over spring break, my husband was taking his mother home from our house, in the opposite direction from where I was.  He found his own set of difficulties to deal with, but we tried to support each other across the distance.  As I complained to him about my parents’ situation, he completely sympathized, as he had gone through similar problems during the last year of his own father’s life.

When we started the drive home Easter Sunday morning, I was all out of energy.  Instead of stopping for a lunch break, we pushed on through and made it home by mid-afternoon.  As we came in the house, there was a heavenly aroma of... bacon?!   I turned the corner from the kitchen to the dining room and there was... an Easter lily!  And heading upstairs there was... my own bathroom.  At the Old Folks Home it was difficult to take a relaxing shower, so the first thing I did when I got home was hop in the shower.  After that, my husband encouraged me to take a nap.  I slept for two hours.  Oh, bliss!

After my nap, I investigated the bacon aroma.  It wasn’t bacon, but was pretty close.  My husband had gone whole hog, shall we say, and cooked a ham on the bone for our Easter dinner.  This may seem like nothing out of the ordinary, but I must remind my readers that it was still Passover.  While the Common Household does not keep kosher, they avoid pork during major Jewish holidays.  Making a ham was a supreme sacrifice for my husband, who is a bona fide nice Jewish boy. 

At the same time, he also made an entire second dinner, in case someone would refuse to eat the ham.  He roasted a turkey breast with vegetables.  He stir-fried some broccoli, and mashed some potatoes.  He really went all out.  Just one more thing needed to complete our Easter dinner – matzo, of course. 

As we sat down to our Easter ham dinner, I saw a parallel, however distant, between God’s sacrifice leading to the Easter resurrection, and the sacrificial meal and reviving naptime my husband offered me.  There was a reason that ham tasted so heavenly.

We have returned to our non-pork existence, but when I use the oven, there is still a faint aroma of bacon that wafts out at me when I open the oven door.  And there are several meals worth of ham in the freezer. 

The Easter-Passover Ham

The non-ham Easter dinner

Easter Still-Life with Lily, Matzo, and Ham

Easter Sunrise

Until this year, the last time I was awake on Easter before sunrise was when I attended a sunrise service on the top of the mountain at Stowe ski resort in Vermont.  The service was very short because the pastor was an avid skier and was raring to ski down the mountain.  I had to ski down too, and that meant falling down every 10 feet because it was the only way I knew to stop.

This year I experienced a much different Easter sunrise.  More bruising, in a way, than falling all the way down a mountain, but filled with love.

The Wednesday before Easter I packed the kids in the car and we went to visit my parents at The Old Folks Home.  My husband was not able to come with us.  My Mom had unexpected gall bladder surgery on Tuesday.  I was to take over the care of my father when my brothers left town on Thursday.  My father has Parkinson’s Disease and severe arthritis.  My mother is his usual caretaker. 

Sadly, my Dad is in pain most of the time, and doesn’t sleep well.  Despite difficulty walking, he still walks whenever he can.  On Thursday, though, he was almost too exhausted to walk back to his apartment from the dining hall.

On Friday I made an executive decision to use the wheelchair liberally, and Dad didn't refuse.  In the evening he was much more alert than the previous night; he played charades with the kids, including him marching around pretending to be Louis XVI King of France, which provoked the kids to raucous laughter. I missed the part where he chopped off his own head, because I had to go cook dinner. 

That night he got up at about midnight to look for Encylopedia Volume 12.   He said, "I want to know who the ancestors of Mary Queen of Scots were, and it's driving me crazy."  I gave him his pain pills and convinced him to go back to bed without Volume 12. 

 

Saturday the doctor cleared my Mom to return to the apartment, and she arrived just before lunch.  Shortly after lunch, my father told her that he had a terrible toothache.  Mom called their dentist, not expecting any result on a Saturday.  By a miracle, the dentist was able to come within the hour to the Old Folks Home to see him.  As I left my worried mother in the apartment to take my Dad to the on-campus dentist’s office, I tried to offer her a word of comfort.  I said, “Try not to worry.  Everything is in God’s hands.”  But Mom was fed up.  She snapped, “Is God going to fix his teeth?”  I said, “No, but God has provided a dentist on Saturday afternoon of a holiday weekend right here on campus.”  Of course, we'd rather my Dad didn't have the tooth pain, but I thought the dentist miracle was a pretty good one.

The diagnosis: tooth abscess.  Solution:  root canal, and in the meantime antibiotics.  The only thing he could do for the pain was to add one more dose of his current pain meds. 

It was a relief to me when we finally got to bed Saturday night.  

At about 4 a.m. there was a loud noise from the bathroom.  Mom, despite her recent surgery, got up and she barked at Dad, “Are you all right?!  What ARE you doing?”  I did not get up to investigate.  But I got an idea of what happened because at 5 a.m. I had to get up and go through their bedroom to use the bathroom.  As I went in, my Dad shouted, “Be careful!”  Mom shouted, “The toilet seat fell off!”  Fairly amusing, actually, but it seemed rather tragic at that moment.

I did not sleep after that.  So when dawn came on Easter morning, I was awake but exhausted.  I wasn’t thinking at all about Easter triumph and glory.

At 6 a.m.  Dad got up and came into the living room where I was on the pull-out couch bed.  I gave him his pain pills but I could tell something still wasn’t right, so I folded up the bed and had him sit on the couch.  He was cold so I covered him with my blanket and sweatshirt.  He looked miserable, but he fell asleep sitting there.  At about 7:30 I gave him the rest of his truckload of pills.  About then Mom got up, and he told her that he had a new pain, in his lower abdomen. 

Mom seemed panicky, and called the nurse.  She said that while we were waiting for the nurse we could have the Easter worship service that I had suggested two days ago. 

So my ailing parents, my Jewish children, and I had an Easter worship service.  My son got out his French horn, he played and we sang Thine is the Glory.   Oldest Daughter read the story of the Women at the Tomb. I read Psalm 114 (you mountains that skip like rams), thinking as I was reading how far my parents are from skipping.  I was about to say, “Let us pray,” knowing that I would not be able to get through a prayer without many tears.

Just then the nurse knocked at the door.  The nurse’s last name was Paine. For real. Despite her name she was very compassionate.  She examined my Dad, and said there was no cause for alarm, that his pain was probably from the antibiotic.  We never resumed our Easter service.  The kids and I started our 5-hour drive home shortly after the nurse left. 

Most Easter services have brass instruments. Most Easter services have people in the congregation who are unsure what they believe about the resurrection story.  Most Easter services have people in the pews who are in pain.  Our Easter service was no exception.  I don’t know if it was acceptable worship in God’s eyes, but it was exactly what we needed.  We did not have pageantry, sermon, or prayer, but we had Love with us in the room.  Alleluia.

P.S.  Another miracle – the handy man fixed their toilet seat on Easter morning.
P.P.S.  My Dad had the root canal this Tuesday, and is recovering.

Grace

Dear Common Household Husband made Easter dinner. Not only that, but it was delicious!

Ginger-Honey chicken, baked on matzo stuffing, with carrots roasted on top. All in one pan! He's a genius.


Sabra Honey-Golden Chicken
1 4 pound chicken, cut into serving pcs salt to taste
1/2 lemon
1/3 c peanut oil
2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 c honey

Rub lemon on chicken pieces. Sprinkle with 1 tsp ginger and salt. Combine oil, honey, and remaining ginger. Brush chicken with honey mixture. Roast at 350 F for 1 1/2 to 2 hours, basting occasionally.