mistersnappy

Passover Fact 8, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

You may think, having looked at all of these photos and read the ramblings that Passover is all about food. Actually this isn’t the case, it’s just that the food seems to take over your every waking thought. From not being able to have your usual breakfast to wondering at what point the matzahs are going to make your insides explode.
Getting side-tracked by food really does take away from the religious and spiritual aspects of Passover. The handing down of the story of the exodus from parent to child amongst other things. But when the hammer falls on the final day, there isn’t much that will keep me from packing away the Passover crockery for another year and stacking it up in the garage in time to leg it to the local take-away for some real food. Usually we ease ourselves back in to leavened product by having a pizza but this year I was down to my local Fish and Chip emporium, the fine Ideal Fish Bar in Pinner.
I had my order in 15 minutes before Passover ended, so I could be back home with supper on the table with no time wasted. To say that was probably the finest meal I’d had in a week, might have been an understatement.
Roll on Passover 2011!

Passover Fact 7, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

This is a poorly cooked Matzah Brei, cooked by me. It’s now day 7 and we are truly fed up of Matzah so we’ve got to find a new way to present these food stuffs that have less nutrition than the box they came in. So what do we do? We soak them in water, or even eggs, and fry them. You can have them with tomato ketchup, if you’ve fried them in eggs, or you can add salt and pepper, or even sugar and cinnamon if you’ve gone the water route. You may not believe it but they are rather yummy, but after a week anything would be better!
Surprisingly this went down quite well with one of the kids. The other one had described what she’d had at a friends house for breakfast after the sleep over, and I thought it was this. When I presented my culinary masterpiece to her, she snarled “That’s not what Anne made! Give me an apple.”
Tomorrow night I’m having proper Pizza!

Passover Fact 6, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

On the first two days of Passover we partake in a family evening meal accompanied by a religious service where we recall the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt. Well at least when there are parents present. When we all pile round to friends houses it can get a little raucous and the traditional service goes out the window and is replaced by comedy passover songs downloaded from the Internet. Yes, the Internet is the new Hagadah! Wine forms an important part of the seder service. You are obliged to drink four cups (small unfortunately) of wine, or grape juice for the kiddies, over the course of the services. Of course, as the week drags on you pine for more wine in bigger glasses until you can take it no more.
Here we are, day 6 and we’ve found the biggest wine glasses we can and are reliving the seder service without the songs, or the religious significance or the food, bar a stack of chocolate but not forgetting the four glasses, each.
2 days to go!

There should be a picture with this but it’s friends and family only… sorry!

Anyhoo, fact 5 is a positive one and there’s food involved! One of the good things about Passover is that it often falls across the Easter bank holiday weekend and this means and good old family outing, complete with picnic. Just to make it clear… we don’t wait all year for a family outing, but these ones seem more special.

This year we loaded up with unleavened food stuffs and headed to Putney to watch the Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge, a first for the Snappys. For those of you who have not seen it yet, look away now… Cambridge won

We got a good spot on the river bank path opposite where the teams came out and set up camp with our picnics and children. They went off for a while with the Mums to let the Dads play cameras for a while. When they came back they were resplendent in the obligatory face paints and managed to acquire about a dozen purple balloons between the three of them, although these were liberated later to ensure a place on the train home!

They all made it back to the river bank for the off and cheered the teams as they rowed past. We all had a great time and the picnic got almost finished, even the Passover wine, which went down a treat!

Passover Fact 4, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

I would loosely describe this as a pizza, but it’s the best we can muster over the Passover period. Just so you know, that’s Matzah (again!), kosher for Passover tomato ketchup with some cheese on top and it briefly visited the grill for a melt too. It wasn’t me who ate it, it was a demanding child desperate for some culinary normality, or whatever passes for that in our house!
Taste-wise, well it’s not what Heston would pass for food but it’s not awful and the plate was cleared in a matter of minutes, so it can’t have been all bad. I am, however, counting the days ’til Tuesday night when we can get back to normal food, by the way of some stodge and junk, namely Fish and Chips or a proper Pizza, but until then…

Passover Fact 3, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

Having a Passover packed lunch for work isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You can have all your usual stuff, even a few squeezy cheeses in silver foil. The only difference is you have to take half a dozen Matzahs to fill you up for the rest of the say. These seemingly innocent slices of unleavened bread will wreak havoc on your insides after a few days. Quite how this happens with the simple ingredients of flour and water I don’t know but year in year out you get to day three and feel like a bloated hippo with wind to match (sorry… too much information!).
Anyhoo, the work packed lunch comes with it’s downside, namely the pile of crumbs it leaves in it’s wake. Today I finished in record time but moved my feet to find a neat sillhouette of my shoes surrounded by Matzah crumbs. One for the office cleaner I guess!

For the last 2 nights we’ve been talking about how the Children of Israel came out of Egypt. It took them a long long time and obviously you need to explain to the kiddie winkies that they didn’t actually have Sat Nav in those days.
Somewhere along the way it definitely says that Moses came down from Mount Sinai in a Triumph. So to prove the point we gaffer taped my iPhone onto a Scalextric Mini (the Triumph wasn’t available) to recreate this great biblical moment. I don’t know about 40 years, it didn’t even make 4 laps. If you consider how much crap Jewish women carry around with them I would say that this wasn’t the way the Children of Israel came out of Egypt. I guess they walked and got their husbands to carry their shit. Not much change there then!

Passover Fact 1, originally uploaded by mistersnappy.

To ease the annual discomfort that is the Jewish festival of Passover, or Pesach to the initiated, I aim to post a single Passover fact each day for your viewing a reading pleasure. At least these are facts according to me [disclaimer!]
Today’s factoid is… whatever you do to matzah, even smothering it in chocolate, you can’t make it nice, not never, not no how. Only 7 days to go now…