The great corned beef crisis of 2010

It's a busy time of year for the Cashew Family. Passover begins tonight at sundown, and Holy Week continues until Sunday with Easter. The house to clean, Easter baskets to fill, Matzoh Ball soup to make... no one said the life of a shiksa is an easy one.

Tonight at sundown our family will sit down to our Seder and celebrate Passover. For me, this is the Super Bowl of all Jewish holidays. Yes, Hanukkah is stretched out over eight nights, and we try hard to have holiday treats every day, but the holiday is rather laid back and it is what you make it. Roshashanna is another favorite, particularly for the kids, since our New Year celebration consists of a dinner predominantly made up of of fresh challah, apples and honey. Yom Kippur is low maintenance since Jason can't eat anyway, I just need to make sure we have a good meal to break his fast. But Passover is an entirely different story.

The word "seder" actually means order, as in the order of the meal, the order of the story, the order of the celebration. For approximately 4000 years Jewish families have sat down together and gone through the same exact "order" to celebrate the holiday. Talk about pressure for a shiksa trying her best.

Our family has developed our own traditions for Passover foods, one being a glazed corned beef for dinner. I like it because it's preparation is simple and works well with the fact that we sit at the table for what could be an hour before it's time to eat. No, it's not a traditional recipe, but a brisket is, and this is about as close as I can get to it.

Saturday morning I hit the grocery store in search of my corned beef and I was dismayed to find not one corned beef. The butcher's response "it isn't the season anymore." What?! Same story at two other stores. Apparently they stock up for St. Patrick's day and then it really isn't on their radar to get more until after the Easter rush for turkeys and hams. Not a corned beef to be found. I realized that in years past I always would buy the Passover corned beef when they were on sale for St. Patrick's Day, but I guess this year I wasn't really thinking of it. So on the eve of our seder I found myself corned beef-less. Jason says it doesn't matter. We'll do chicken. Which he also says is the Jewish answer to any menu-planning crisis.

Off to prep the chicken, wash the parsley, and set the table, and if I'm lucky I can get a quick run in to the store to get some things for the Easter baskets.

I can do this

No one could ever accuse me or my sweet husband of being talented Do-It-Yourself people. We are far from it. Over the years, we have become very talented at saving money to pay others to do things for us.

When we first became homeowners, we quickly learned our limits, not that we didn't try new things, but we knew when to call in the professionals. Snake a drain? No problem. Replace hardware in the shower? Easy. That is until the ancient, corroded pipe snapped off in Jason's hand. Time to call the plumber. Take down the ceiling tiles? Maybe. Until we discovered lead paint behind them. Professional time.

We did attempt to paint a room... once. Isn't painting the number one easy DIY project? Everyone says that on TV. We tried it. I wouldn't call it a disaster, but the end result wasn't very pretty to look at. Not really the effect we were going for. We haven't painted a room since.

I find our DIY aversion rather peculiar since we both come from hardy DIY stock. Jason's mother can wield a power tool like no other. If she can't do it herself, it probably isn't worth doing. On my side of the family, my father is meticulous with a project once he gets going and sets his mind to something. His strong suit is landscaping and gardening, another area we struggle with. Jason's philosophy is "if it's green and grows, I'm mowing it" and that's just about the extent of what he wants to do in the form of yard work. I'm not much better. I try, every year I try, to stay on top of the weeding and the edging and the deadheading and trimming. It just all seems so never ending that I lose my motivation, get overwhelmed and give in to the weeds.

I'm determined to change.

In November, we finally put a hardwood floor in our living room. I say "we" as in we paid a very nice local business to install it. My part of the project consisted of picking the floor and then staying home while the floor was installed. Tough, huh? What I didn't expect was that the new floor would lead to another project (don't they all?). I didn't realize that to install the floor the existing wood baseboard molding needed to be removed. I suppose someone must have mentioned that to me along the way, but I must have blocked it out. Much to my dismay, the molding suffered some damage being pried off and later reattached to the wall. We now had a beautiful floor and marked up, ugly baseboards.

My first reaction was to cry. My second was to hire someone to fix it. The more we talked about it the more we convinced ourselves we could do this. The affected areas weren't all that big once you looked around the room.Wood filler. Sand. Paint. We could do this.

Today I pulled out my brand new putty knife, donned some rubber gloves and started scraping filler into the dents and nail holes. I can do this. Maybe if I keep telling myself that, I'll start to believe it. Stay tuned for sanding. One step at a time.

Mystery Containers

I've been home sick with a cold for a few days, and I just opened the fridge to see what was hiding in the back. I pulled out a container of green beans, and knowing that I didn't serve them to Jason's mom who arrived a week ago, I opened them up and took a sniff. Problem is, I can't smell a thing. I'm stuffed up like a Build a Bear Workshop animal.

It appears I have two options. Throw everything in question away. Or, when Jason comes home, say "I think this stuff may be bad, will you smell it?"

For our entire marriage, Jason constantly points out to me how ridiculous it is for me to eat something, make a face and say, "I think this is bad. Try it."

Guess I'm throwing the stuff away. It only took me 14 years of marriage to figure out the answer to that question!

Picking up pine cones

This afternoon the five of us took advantage of the beautiful weather and went down the street to my parent's house to tidy up a bit. We picked up sticks, pine cones and trash that appeared from under the melted snow. A landscaping crew we were not, but our quick clean up did make a difference. My parents are putting their house on the market in a week or so and in this market, anything that will get buyers through the doors is a good thing. When I think back to our home shopping days, Jason and I drove by more houses than the ones we actually went inside. Outward appearances say a lot.

As I dragged a barrel behind me tossing in pine cones I couldn't help but think about the many times I stood in that space. My family moved to this house when I was nine, and thirty years later I now live a few houses away. Understandably, this whole process of my parents moving is bittersweet and emotional for me too. That house is my other home.

Intellectually I understand and am happy that my parents will be blessed with a beautiful new home that will make life easy for them. Emotionally it's a chapter closing with my childhood home changing hands. Another reminder that life is short and keeps on rolling so you better stop and take a look around. Moving through the backyard I had this mini movie go through my head of moments I hope to always remember.

There was the fabulous retirement party and 60th birthday party my mom threw for my dad in 2000 with a dance floor under a tent, music and caterers scurrying around. I was seven months pregnant at the time and remember crying like a baby half the night overwhelmed by my emotions.

There was the 25th anniversary party my siblings and I organized for my parents in 1988 where we surprised them by flying my sister home early from her semester abroad in England. She hid in a box in the back of a truck and we drove her right into the backyard as my parent's present.

Even earlier, I remember summer nights camping out in the backyard with my sisters and friends, being silly, eating junk, and staying up late, daring each other to run around the house in the middle of the night in our undies.

My grandparents sitting on chairs in the shade on Sunday afternoons simply watching my dad work in the garden.

My own kids playing wiffle ball and running laps around the house.

The spectacular lilac bush that bursts open every Mother's day as a gift to us all, reminding us of my uncle who nurtured it in his own yard before his passing.

Good times. All of them. So much joy in one place. And this is just me picking up pine cones. I haven't even started on the inside. This is going to be more difficult than I thought, but the memories so wonderful to experience again. What good is a memory if you don't get a chance to dig it out again?