I stocked up on Passover cake mixes so I would have something to snack on this week, and sure enough, today I made one of the cakes, a Manischewitz extra moist chocolate cake mix. It’s remarkably good. Of course I would never choose a Passover cake mix for any of the rest of the year (unless it’s marked way down after the holiday, which is worth keeping an eye out for) but this would be acceptable when it’s not Passover.
I made mushroom omelets for breakfast, which is so much a part of our Sunday morning routine for the past couple of years, not just the pandemic year, that I will probably not mention it in subsequent posts. In the summer, when we have fresh herbs from our garden, I am apt to substitute “scrambled eggs with garden green stuff”, but we have been ordering baby Bella mushrooms for omelets every week since we started with Imperfect Foodsand some fancier mushrooms, like Shiitake or Oyster mushrooms, to use in stir fries most weeks for the past couple of months.
Ari called me on Face Time this morning. Sometimes when he does that he doesn’t pay any attention to the call and I wonder what the point is, but today he was talking the whole time telling me what he was building with magnetic tiles, what shapes he could make with them, how there was a tunnel for Lego cars to go through in what he was building, and on and on.
We didn’t really do the first half of the Seder tonight, but I at least reviewed the section that describes a bunch of the ancient rabbis trying to outdo each other in describing how many plagues there really were in Egypt before the exodus. Of course the Bible says ten. What about at the Red Sea? One rabbi figured there were fifty plagues there, because the Egyptian magicians told Pharoh that the ten plagues was the finger of God, and later the miracle at the Red Sea is described as the hand of God — so ten plagues in Egypt, fifty at the Red Sea. Then another rabbi says, “don’t forget the verse that says ‘He sent forth against them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, indignation and trouble, a band of evil angels.’ Wrath, indignation, trouble, band of evil angels — each of those fifty was really four, making 200 total.” A third rabbi says, “You counted wrong, you left out ‘the fierceness of his anger’, it should really be 250 total.” After close to 2000 years, it’s impossible to know whether they were serious or the four glasses of wine at the Seder played some part in some friendly one-upsmanship. Anyway, I think that’s a fun section of the Haggadah that’s left out of the modern more meaningful editions.
We did have an extended zoom session after supper with Arlene’s siblings, one of her older cousins-once-removed, and her aunt Lee to sing some of the long songs at the end of the Haggadah and reminisce about family seders of long ago