In a normal week, Sunday morning sees this week’s blog post as my number one priority. In a normal week. This is not a normal week.

In a normal week, by Sunday evening, the post is done and dusted. It’s been written, reviewed by me, read and approved by Bernice, revised by me, set up in WordPress and scheduled to go live on Tuesday morning. In a normal week. This is not a normal week.

I am writing this at 8:30 on Monday evening. Despite the lateness of the hour (Go Live minus 12:30 hours), I have no idea what I am going to write about and, to be honest, I feel more asleep than awake. But my public (such as it is) awaits me; the show must go on. So here we go.

This is not a normal week since, as you will hardly need me to remind you, Pesach begins on Wednesday night. All religious holidays obviously require a certain amount of spiritual preparation; for me this usually involves study, in the form of reading a book or some articles or shiurim or listening to recorded or live talks and shiurim. However, on no other holiday am I, are we, so thoroughly tested on our degree of preparation. On Pesach, we are expected to provide stimulating questions, discussion points and observations. No pressure, then.

Pesach is also unusual in that it involves physical preparation. Not uniquely, of course: before sukkot there is a lot of physical preparation: flimsy temporary structures that are liable to collapse don’t, after all, build themselves. However, building a sukkah pales into insignificance beside the logistic challenge of cleaning a house for Pesach while, at the same time, living and cooking and eating in it.

Of course, I realise how lucky we are. We no longer have six-year-olds who post wafers into their money-boxes and don’t think to mention it to anyone. (In fairness we never did have a six-year-old like that.) We no longer have twelve-year-olds who leave a sandwich in their schoolbag at the beginning of the year and forget about it, only for it to be discovered in late March. (In fairness, we did have a twelve-year-old exactly like that. I leave you to guess whether it was Esther or Micha’el.)

I also realise how lucky I am. I have never played my part in preparing meals, so the waves of chag, shabbat, chag, shabbat have never struck terror into my heart as they do into Bernice’s.

But Pesach is something else. First of all, to make up for all those years when I was out clubbing sabre-tooth tigers while Bernice was scrubbing cupboards, I strive to play my part in Pesach cleaning. We start what one ex-colleague of mine regarded as ludicrously late: he and his wife started cleaning for Pesach every year immediately after Hannukah. Others might regard it as early. I tackle each of the kitchen drawer units in turn, giving them a really thorough clean so that the final clean can be much quicker. These days, I feel I can only tackle one unit per day, so I spread that over two weeks.

Meanwhile, we confine eating to the kitchen and dining room, so that Bernice’s pre-Shabbat house cleaning can, over two weeks, be even more thorough than usual.

This year, we moved on to Phase 2 towards the end of last week: getting rid of, or putting aside for pre-Pesach eating, our odd bits of hametz in the freezer and the cupboards; cleaning the overflow fridge and freezer in the utility room, ready to move over all the non-Pesach perishables; doing our big Pesach Rami Levi shop; condensing the non-Pesach food into half of the kitchen drawers.

Yesterday (Sunday) morning, we were up early for our big push. We teamed up to tackle the kitchen fridge-freezer; Bernice took on the oven and hob, while I got the microwave, wine-fridge. (I know this sounds as though I’m not pulling my weight, but ever since the year when I cleaned the oven really thoroughly and couldn’t quite put it back together again, Bernice has declared it off-limits for me.) Finally, I condensed the non-Pesach dishes and cutlery into half of the kitchen drawers.

These days, I seem to pack ever more efficiently, so that finding drawer space for all the bits and pieces that normally live on the worktop – the mixer, peanut jars (yes, two jars, since you ask: one for raw peanuts in their husks and one for home-roasted – this is a serious peanut-eating household), coffee machine, condiment set, butter dish – seemed ridiculously easy.

By the time we collapsed into bed last night, we were all set for a post-breakfast switch-over today, which went more smoothly than ever. Having cleared away after breakfast, we took a moment to admire the stark elegance of an uncluttered kitchen, and agreed that, despite the fact that this was the way our interior designer urged us to live, it seemed completely lifeless. (Personally, I would be happiest with something halfway between unlived in and cluttered, but there you are.) Then Bernice swept and washed the floors, while I attacked the work surfaces. In no time at all, I was ready to retrieve, from the cupboard under the stairs, the polygal (corrugated plastic) sheets with which we cover the work surface, and the plastic sink inserts.

In previous years, I have struggled to work out exactly how the various pieces of polygal (which I cut, several years ago, with cunning skill, from only five sheets we bought) fit together round the kitchen. This year, it all fell into place. Even manoeuvring the water machine to fit the polygal under it produced no disasters, and in no time at all I was up on the stepladder, handing down to Bernice all the Pesach dishes and glassware and kitchen equipment. 

By 11:30, we were able to enjoy a cup of tea, which in my case was Chai Masala, which I thought I liked, but now discover I do not. If anyone would like a box of Adanim Chai Masala, with only one bag missing, you’re invited to come and collect it.

Perceptive readers will be wondering what I was doing between 11:30 and now, that prevented me writing my post during the afternoon. Funny you should ask.

My father, alav hashalom, once he retired, always loved to bake for Pesach. He would make almond macaroons, cinnamon balls, and a French chocolate cake that, even though it was in Evelyn Rose’s kosher cookery book, and even though it used potato flour, was not, unaccountably, listed in the Pesach section of the book. It was, however, obviously, ideal for Pesach.

After we moved to Israel, my parents visited us from England over Pesach, and Dad continued to bake, wonderfully, every year. After he died, I felt I had to take up the mantle, and so I continued the tradition. Bernice generously agreed to give me first dibs at the kitchen every year after we change over, so I traditionally take the rest of changeover day.

I soon added to my repertoire coconut pyramids, originally simply because they use yolks only, and I was easily able to bake quantities that meant using equal numbers of egg whites (four each for macaroons and cinnamon balls) and yolks (eight for coconut pyramids). The French chocolate cake, very efficiently, uses equal numbers of yolks and whites.

Unfortunately (purely from the aspect of egg efficiency), a colleague at work shared a recipe for florentines that is so ludicrously simple, and so delicious, that I readily adopted it for Pesach. (Bung egg whites, sugar, chocolate chips, chopped dried fruit and chopped almonds in a bowl, stir, and dollop onto a baking tray.) So now I have to make a heavily yolky omelette on the day I bake.

Over the years, I have, in theory, perfected this baking day. I tackle the recipes in order, so that the baking time of item x is a little longer than the preparation time for item x+1. Fortunately, all of the recipes call for an oven at 170^o-180^oC, so oven use is efficient. The instruction manual that I have written for this entire enterprise gives total kitchen time as 3.5 hours. This, of course, assumes that everything goes according to plan, and every baton change, as it were, is effortless.

Today, it didn’t, and it wasn’t. First of all, I finished mixing the ingredients for pyramids, carefully shaped 20 of them, using my favourite eggcup, and only then realised that the reason the mixture seemed a little wet was that, although the number of eggs I had used was correct for the double batch I always make, I had followed the original recipe for single quantities of coconut, sugar and lemon, so that I now had to dump my 20 perfectly formed pyramids back into the mixing bowl, weigh and mix more coconut, sugar and lemon, and start shaping again.

A little put off my stride by this setback, I plunged into more confusion with quantities of ground almonds for the cinnamon balls. I normally grind my own almonds. However, this year Bernice found that the ground almonds were cheaper than the whole almonds, and so she bought enough for my recipes. It was only as I was setting up that I remembered that I had discovered years previously why commercial cinnamon balls are so dark inside, whereas home-baked ones are usually much lighter. The secret is not the cinnamon, nor kiddush wine, as I used to think, but rather the almonds. Commercial cinnamon balls are made with almonds that have not been blanched.

So, I decided to use home-ground, unblanched almonds for a third of the mixture, to give the colour I wanted. However, when I came to weigh and mix together the two kinds of ground almond, I unaccountably ended up with 250 grams more of mixture than I needed. Fortunately, I had, at that stage, not mixed the two kinds of almond together thoroughly, and so I spent a few exhilarating minutes carefully scooping blanched ground almond out of the mixture.

All of this helps to explain why the three-and-a-half hours expanded to just over five! Bernice was kind enough to remind me that I had a set of similar, but, of course, not identical, hiccoughs last year before Pesach. I am beginning to suspect that several days of intensive cleaning and a feeling of terminal exhaustion are not the best preparation for a smooth afternoon of baking, but what can you do?

So, now you understand why I have no idea what to write about this week. Sorry! You’ll just have to make do with some pictures.