I know. Since my little journey to the wilds of New Jersey, I haven't been around much.
Last week, I was dealing with the update to my friends' website. You know, the one for the clothing line, that really needs to be done by a professional, but is given to me because we are friends and my price is right (by that, I mean cheap). The one I feel guilty about charging for because my skills are so limited, I am unable to do the clothes justice (but I do charge, because I end up spending about 20 or 30 hours on it and by golly, I don't do it for fun).
This spring, the update was even more tortuous than usual, because they went with a different photographer. Their old photographer gave me everything on disk, all formatted with consistent sizes and orientations. But this time around, I got photos that were splayed every which way, in different angles... so I spent eight hours just rotating photos, and another ten hours trying to get the size of the thumbnails consistent (which was impossible, so I did the best I could -- which is not so good). And then, after I'd finished laying them out on pages, I saw that I needed to play with the size of the photos some more.
Anyway -- that project is almost done. Everything is out on the pages. Now all I have to do is meet with my friends so they can tell me how they want the pages refined (i.e., I get a disk of photos and I have to guess which t-shirts are for children and which are for women, and I don't always get it right). So I still have a little more work to do, but now I'm at the manageable point.
So, you'd think I could get back to the business of blogging, right? That I will be back in my space here (and my space there and there and there and there).
But nooooooooooooooo... not so fast. My posts are going to remain kind of slim for at least another week, thanks to the ritual dinner and re-telling of the story of Moses that is my duty, as a Jewish mother, to perform each year: Passover.
A few years back (while I was kvetching about the very same thing), a friend of mine (obviously a gentile) remarked that she thought it was funny that all her Jewish friends made such a big deal over this holiday. Uh, yeah. Think of this as Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter all rolled into one, with a table that must be set according to ancient rules and a service that must be performed in a particular order, and a dinner with specific courses that are made around dietary limitations that vary, whether you are an Ashkenazi Jew (from Eastern Europe) or a Sephardic Jew (from the Mediterranean/Middle East).
Lucky me. I'm the product of a mixed marriage. Of course, I know that anything made of leavened bread is verboten. But I can never remember the rest of the rules, and they get all mixed up in my head. For instance, can you serve corn? (I just Googled it: It's okay for the Sephardim and a no-no for Ashkenazis, which explains the problem I had one year when I picked the wrong side dish to bring to a potluck seder).
The Passover table is where my dad's aunts used to argue over the merits of big fluffy matzo balls (the secret: club soda) over chewy little hard ones (yes, I know how that sounds. Grow up.) There were times I thought these discussions would turn into drag-down fights.
My mom's aunts didn't engage in soup one-upmanship. There isn't a matzo ball or gefilte fish in sight at a Sephardic seder. With that side of the family, the meal would include leek patties, lemon chicken and a yummy Spinach Mina (kind of a meat and spinach pie, using layers of matzo as a crust).
Once my sister married, moved to Northern California and began having babies (years before me), my parents followed her up there, and my Passovers became something of a minimalist thing. There were years when we could make it up to Sacramento and enjoy the big family seder... but most of the time, my husband and I forged our own tradition down here with our daughter. This was complicated by the fact that I married outside the faith. My husband has no memories of getting drunk on Manischewitz at the age of nine, nor any particular food preferences (which liberated me to explore and find my own Passover dishes).
If Passover fell on a weekend, we might invite some friends to join us - but other than that, our seders were quiet affairs for the three of us. They weren't as much fun as the big family gathering, but there was very little stress to them.
And then, everything changed.
My sister's two oldest children are now attending universities in Southern California. Last year, we shifted the seder to my house - but my parents decided they did not want to make the trip down here. We had a nice seder, but it was weird -- and my mom and dad let us know they were lonely up there.
This year, everyone is coming down for the seder. But the twist is that it will be held in my niece's apartment near UCLA. She has a tiny kitchen, so a lot of the dishes are going to be prepared at my house and then schlepped to Westwood, as are the china service, the silverware, the seder plate, etc. We will be renting tables and chairs to accommodate the 16 or 17 people who will be there.
Don't get me wrong: it will be nice to have such a large gathering for Passover. But I feel like the planning that is going into it is akin to invading Normandy.
Plus, my mom will be down here on Thursday. We will be sharing cooking duties, in my kitchen.
I'm very territorial in my kitchen. I'm also afraid of being judged. I may have mentioned that housekeeping is not one of my talents. "Fun" may not be the right word to describe my house this week as I try to get everything in order.
Of course, the first thing we all discussed was the matzo ball soup. My mother and sister have conceded this prize to me. I have a nice recipe I took out of Bon Appetit magazine several years ago, incorporating leeks and chives and a touch of ginger (you use ginger ale to make them fluffy instead of the club soda). What's cool about it is that the matzo balls are seasoned s well that you can get by with just sticking them in some warmed up chicken broth and it tastes elegant instead of thin.
At least, that's what I think. Let's hope I don't end up wrestling with my sister over this and the kugel.
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