Matzoh ballin' aka My First Passover Seder

I forget exactly how he brought it up, but around the end of April, Dave asked me if I wanted to come over on a Saturday night and help him make matzoh balls to feed 16 people. After the fun we had making strawberry jam (speaking in hick accents, pretending like we lived in a "little house on the prarrie," see photo below) I decided this offer was too good to pass up.


And true enough, stirring together chicken fat, matzoh ball mix and water was outrageous fun. This time, the hick accents were replaced by a plethora of "ball" themed jokes. Apparently, we are no more mature than the junior high school students we teach. The best and worst part of the evening was "quality control." I think the best part is fairly self explanitory, the worst part was limiting the quality control to only one or two matzoh balls each. Patience, patience!

The following night was the actual Seder dinner at the lovely Naoko sensei's house. When I arrived, the table was set beautifully and I couldn't wait to eat! Dinner could wait however, as we had an hour of history, symbolic nibbling and badly pronounced prayer to get through first. If you want to learn more about what we said or munched on, I suggest speaking to your closest Jewish friend or a Google search, since it can't really be summed up in a just a few sentences.

Washing our hands like one big happy family. It really was nice to be surrounded by gaijin and Nihonjin alike to take part in an ancient non-Japanese ritual.

And finally the feast!!

I was literally full for about 2 days after we had the Seder. I am sad I won't be around for next year's.