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I used to not really understand why so many people complained about eating matzoh. I loved matzoh. I ate it up yum.
But remember I don't keep kosher? I didn't eschew leavening for eight days either. Now, I have not become more religious (if anything, less, though that raises mathematical questions I cannot answer if I try to quanitfy it), nor have I become in any way actually observant or traditional. It's just Passover that has become kind of central to my year (probably because winter and fall festivals are really difficult to do for some reason). And in the last few years I have gradually come to observe the custom of eating matzoh instead of bread (and largely other starches, though I refuse to become all the way ridiculous and eschew any food that swells when cooked or potatoes because if you leave them alone for long enough they'll grow wild yeast, and I definitely don't walk around with a candle and a feather getting every crumb, which would be dumb in a household of people none of whom are paying attention).
And I have discovered why the stuff is called "the bread of affliction."
The affliction is, it sits in your belly like lead. It's not especially good for your blood sugar, it's hygroscopic and leaves your throat dry, it turns to glue in the mouth, it projects nasty little flakes all over the landscape, and it sits in your belly like lead.
Today is the last day and I still have two and a half boxes left (well, we ran out at seder last year and I knew I'd be the only one bringing them and I thought we were going to have well over twenty people and it was hard to find them in the store so I naturally overbought). These boxes will be eaten much more slowly.
Also, I gained four pounds.
(dayenu means roughly, it would be enough, and it's a song you sing at the seder about how that fellow with the name that must not be said has given us so much, meaning things like the Torah and Sabbath, but it's a rousing sort of tongue-twister of a song and fun to sing. The young folks -- Emma's friends who go to the Hillel seder -- introduced a supposedly Sephardic tradition of beating each other with green onions while singing the song and we tried it out, and darlings, we're not doing that next year. Our problem is that one of the true grownups is not truly a grownup and he discovered that green onions make very nice aerodynamic darts)
But remember I don't keep kosher? I didn't eschew leavening for eight days either. Now, I have not become more religious (if anything, less, though that raises mathematical questions I cannot answer if I try to quanitfy it), nor have I become in any way actually observant or traditional. It's just Passover that has become kind of central to my year (probably because winter and fall festivals are really difficult to do for some reason). And in the last few years I have gradually come to observe the custom of eating matzoh instead of bread (and largely other starches, though I refuse to become all the way ridiculous and eschew any food that swells when cooked or potatoes because if you leave them alone for long enough they'll grow wild yeast, and I definitely don't walk around with a candle and a feather getting every crumb, which would be dumb in a household of people none of whom are paying attention).
And I have discovered why the stuff is called "the bread of affliction."
The affliction is, it sits in your belly like lead. It's not especially good for your blood sugar, it's hygroscopic and leaves your throat dry, it turns to glue in the mouth, it projects nasty little flakes all over the landscape, and it sits in your belly like lead.
Today is the last day and I still have two and a half boxes left (well, we ran out at seder last year and I knew I'd be the only one bringing them and I thought we were going to have well over twenty people and it was hard to find them in the store so I naturally overbought). These boxes will be eaten much more slowly.
Also, I gained four pounds.
(dayenu means roughly, it would be enough, and it's a song you sing at the seder about how that fellow with the name that must not be said has given us so much, meaning things like the Torah and Sabbath, but it's a rousing sort of tongue-twister of a song and fun to sing. The young folks -- Emma's friends who go to the Hillel seder -- introduced a supposedly Sephardic tradition of beating each other with green onions while singing the song and we tried it out, and darlings, we're not doing that next year. Our problem is that one of the true grownups is not truly a grownup and he discovered that green onions make very nice aerodynamic darts)