An Incredibly Busy Week Coming Up

I will be out in my garden on Sunday planting many kinds of lettuce, arugula, garden cress, radishes, mustard. I also get to check the seedings I started inside and see how they’re doing and if they need help like feeding or thinning.  I will be starting cucumbers this week as soon as the main-crop tomatoes  germinate. We’ve run out of space in the bay window so the tomatoes will have to go into the greenhouse on heated pads.

Monday I have to organize for my new assistant, who will come in for a few hours later in the week to learn the whereabouts of what she may need and the filing cabinets, how Dale organized the computer, and how she may want to reorganize it.  I’m anxious to see how we work together. 

She’s coming to our Seder Wednesday evening along with six other friends. Lilli, who always comes and has been a constant and helpful guest for a couple of decades, called me today to inform me she had two surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic including open  heart surgery.  She is very weak. She will be missed.

My actual 90th birthday, is Tuesday. Woody scheduled two interviews that day, so we won’t celebrate till he gets back here in the afternoon. Then he’ll give me a few presents and make me a glorious supper.

Wednesday we’ll be cooking all day for the Seder. I’ll hard boil 8 eggs the morning of my birthday and make charoset. I don’t make Ashkenazie charoset as I cannot digest walnuts. If I accidentally eat walnuts, they go through me like pieces of plastic. That goes back to when I stayed with a peasant family in Crete in a mountain village Ano Moulia with the water well at one end of the village and the latrine at the other. I got a recurrent violent illness that the Lahey Clinic told me was psychological but which was correctly diagnosed at the NYU hospital as paratyphoid and cured with a week or two – but the disease had permanently destroyed my ability to produce an enzyme necessary for digesting true tree nuts. I can eat peanuts [not a nut], pistachio nuts, pine nuts, pecans and almonds.

So I make Sephardic charoset with apples, figs, dates, dried apricots, almonds and of course, kosher sweet wine and spices. I will also be making with the hard cooked eggs a Sephardic salad of fennel and cucumbers with a olive oil lemon dressing.

Woody is going to make his elegant light matzoh balls and what he inisists on calling his famous chicken soup.  I will be roasting a leg of lamb with a cinnamon parsley crust. Chaim and Theresa are bringing gefilte fish from the Bronx, old fashioned matzoh and kosher l’Pesach dessert, also from NYC. Bonnie and David are bringing red and white horseradish. They will bring the wine that Lilli has always brought.

I revised the Haggadah this week. I had a lot of trouble getting into it—computer issues. I had to get my computer service involved before I could change anything. Finally,  they got me going and I had printer problems. All is well now. 

Woody is making strawberry cheese for my 90th birthday party Saturday evening at the Grotzes. I don’t have to do a damned thing. Bruce is making a pie [I am not fond of regular American cakes, although I do like upside-down cake and make it sometimes Karen is bringing antipasto. which everyone loves. Tasha is doing all the rest of the cooking and that will be wonderful. I’m usually the one who puts on parties, which I love to do, but I wasn’t about to throw myself a party @ 90.