Here’s what our beautiful table looked like for Passover. It’s scattered with rosemary and bay leaves, which smelled wonderful and even more so when we set hot pans of food on top of them. The after picture is the pile of silverware to be sorted and put away the next morning. There were 12 of us total but I somehow managed to miss counting myself in all of my calculations. We had to scramble at the last minute and squeeze in another place setting!

Here’s the never-ending menu:

• Eggs and Onions
• Gefilte Fish with Horseradish (From a West Hollywood Russian Deli)
• Beets
• Chopped liver
• Matzo ball soup
• Ashenazi Chrosset  (Apples, Walnuts and sweet wine)
• Sephardic Chrosset (Figs, Dates and spices plus more…Thanks, Marcia)
• Matzo
• Brisket
• Roast chicken
• Potato Kugel (Go Doug! I still have one bit left for breakfast tomorrow)
• Tzimmes (Carl, the wonder cook)
• Farfel (Thanks, Ed)
• Green beans with pearl onions and tomatoes (Carl again!)
•  Sponge cake
• Chocolate Almond Cake (Yummy, Howard)
• Carl’s incredible cookies!!
• Honey Cake

Annie really has been re-dubbed “partner-in-crime”. I couldn’t have pulled it off without her. Between her most excellent chicken liver pate, the best sponge cake I’ve ever had (her great grandmother’s recipe) and just a tremendous amount of work I am ever so grateful.

For those who aren’t familiar – at Passover, after reading the Haggadah (the story of the Exodus+ … think The Ten Commandments) the meal usually starts with a hard boiled egg in salt water. This year I changed things up by updating an old standby Jewish appetizer called eggs and onions. My mother made it with raw white onions and I hated it. Old recipes call for using chicken fat; I used this year’s new crop unfiltered olive oil.

Matzo Balls cooking

We moved on to the fish and the beets with the pate, chrosset and matzo sticking around through the soup course.

Brisket heading back into the oven for its SECOND cooking

Then out came all the goodness of the main course followed by a break for more reading, talking and singing and then it was on to the dessert(s). Somehow, today, my pants still button and finally my feet and back have stopped aching. I LOVE Passover but it is a lot of work, which many hands make possible!

Next stop Shavuot, the cheesecake holiday!