Hi Mata

Alex V — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 03:11:45 -0500

Thank you very much for the recipes. Indeed get very tasty)))

Peeling it to the core: Passover and more

Mata H — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:58:39 -0500

It was a sublimely ordinary afternoon. What delight there is to be had in the ordinary, the simple act of peeling vegetables with an old friend. The ordinary moments when there are no crises, no worries, no anxieties, no demands. Time glides along as smoothly as the crisp peel unwinding perfectly from a ruby red apple.

Yesterday was my day to help with "the peeling". Passover Seders involving two nights of 20 people each night mean that a LOT of food gets prepared. One of the easiest ways to help someone prepare this, is to volunteer as The Peeler, a title I invented, by the way. So, every year, I am The Peeler for my extended family.

What this means is that I sit in the kitchen and peel vegetables for about five hours straight and put them by type and by menu item into various ziplock bags. That way when Jack, our host, is ready to cook, he just grabs the right sequence of bags and pours them out into the right sequence of pots and pans. I peeled Thursday. He will start cooking Saturday for Monday's 1st night.

I peeled, cored and cut up about 40 or 50 apples of four varieties and chopped up several lemons for applesauce, which was cooked right away. It is actually tastier after a few days. Then there were carrots for the chicken soup, the tzimmes and the gefilte fish. Lots of carrots. Dozens and dozens of carrots. Sweet potatoes for the tzimmes - maybe a dozen big ones. Beets for the borscht, 8 or nine huge ones -- enough to turn my hands deep, mystical purple. Onions for the soup and the gefilte fish - giant ones - maybe 8 or nine. A large, unwieldy celery root for the chicken stock. A half dozen parsnips...and so on.

It was great fun. There I was, peeling and chatting and catching up on every shred of extended family newsy bits from Jack, who hovered and prepared around me. The kitchen was sweet with the smell of cooking apples. Time flew as mountains of peels accumulated. We drank coffee and recalled past Seders, remembered people who have passed away that used to celebrate with us all, and as the afternoon sun slanted through the windows, discussed houseplants and weather conditions.

When I was young, I thought I lived for moments of passion - for the peak experiences of pleasure or discovery or commitment or zeal. Now, I treasure the mundane, the simple, the quiet treasures found in gentle discourse, shared memory.

I am no less passionate about life, but I seem to have shifted what I treasure most in it.

These simple times are what sustains us. Whether they are the moment when you wipe back the hair from your child's forehead as they sleep, the instant when you finally get to sit down for a cup of tea with the person you love most after a hectic day together, the way you find yourself finishing the sentences of an old friend -- these become the real jewels in our lifetime treasure chest. Finding a picture of a fine recalled moment, re-reading a beloved phrase in a beloved book, seeing the sun glint off snow or sea or blossoms -- these are the tiny moments when we let our souls exhale, stop for a second and realize that the sweetest fruit might actually be that which we know best.

My wish for us all is that we find moments of simple and ordinary joy throught our day today, and that we allow ourselves to be well and truly moved by the sweet comfort that can bring.

(P.S. Please check out the fun recipes in Kalyn Denny's fine column on Passover recipes!)

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Hi Mata

Peeling it to the core: Passover and more