Pre-Pesach Culinary Blues

The pre-Pesach season is both exciting and disturbing to my family. Exciting, because due to our exuberant cleaning for the holiday, emptying drawers, overturning mattresses and, in general, preparing the house for a visit by Martha Stewart, we find all kinds of things that have been missing in action for months.

Today, one son found a Game Boy game under a bookshelf and two week’s worth of allowance in the sock drawer. He even found something relevant to the task at-hand, which was the vestiges of a Chips Ahoy! package, still full of crumbs. My daughter found a long-lost favorite hairbrush in the closet and some packets of candy under her bed. She has no idea how the candy, a brand expressly forbidden by me, got to her room, but is sure that she had nothing to do with it.

The countervailing bad news in this otherwise sunny scenario is that we eat some strange and even terrible dinners before the festival of freedom. See, I hate to waste any food, and I have no pride whatsoever when it comes to reaching back into the recesses of the freezer or pantry and patching together something resembling a meal, even from scraps of pita bread with a terminal case of freezer burn.

A few days ago, for example, I cleaned out another freezer shelf and used it to offer up the following "meal" (perhaps this is a stretch) for the six of us: 13 fish sticks, a lone piece of petrified pizza, a cup- and-a-half of roasted pistachios, a bowl of corn and two cheese blintzes. My kids looked with horror at this sorry excuse for a family dinner and begged for cereal and — appealing to my sense of Pesach preparation — noted that we still had five boxes left. After standing guard to make sure they ate at least two fish sticks each, I gave in and watched them practically run over one another to make a real dinner out of Honeycomb, Crispix and milk.

During the rest of the year, as soon as the kids see me after school, they ask impatiently, "HiMaWhatsFaDinna?" But, once they come home and see we are wiping down linen closets and dusting off toys to make them chametz-free, they are too frightened to ask. And if they dare, it is with a quivering voice.

My husband, who has learned a thing or two in nearly 15 years of marriage, just eats what’s offered. He knows that brisket is just around the corner on seder night. The kids begin pleading for pizza. They are so earnest in their appeals, they even offer to do extremely uncharacteristic things, such as clean their own rooms and bathe without waiting for any parental threats or intimidation.

And they know they will soon get their pizza, because at a certain point, I will run out of food. And because no one is eager to eat Pesach food before absolutely mandated by law, we, along with about 4,000 of our neighbors, start hitting the kosher pizza joints. Let me tell you, if there was ever a proving ground for our perseverance as a people, you can see it in the lines at the pizza shops in the waning days before Pesach. No one has chametz in the house anymore. No one wants to cook. Everyone is turning their kitchens around to be kosher for Pesach, and we will wait as long as it takes, sometimes for days, for a hot pizza and calzone.

Well, my pantry and freezer are pretty bare right now, so this will probably be the last night I can get away with serving another in the series of pathetic pre-Pesach portions. Tonight we are having three thawed-out chicken drumsticks (age indeterminate), six bagels (with only moderate freezer burn), pretzels (only semi-stale), peanut butter and canned peaches.

With the yom tov only days away, we’re so close to repast redemption, I can almost smell the brisket now.