A Checked and Plaid Rosh Hashanah
By Allison Kaplan
When I told my mother, weeks ago, that I wouldn't be able to make it home to Minneapolis for Rosh Hashanah, she cried.
When, a few days later, I told her my brother and I would spend the holiday together in Chicago, she cried again.
Joy, apparently.
I've spent my share of High Holidays attending Hillel services in crowded, but sterile, university lecture halls. Those days usually get capped off with a store bought cup of matzah ball soup to be eaten at home alone.
But with my younger brother now living a few blocks away, and with my fiancé assuming I'll make our High Holiday plans, I felt overwhelmed by responsibility.
I decided to cook.
What fun! I have the perfect candle centerpiece, I'll play a Jewish music CD, we can eat and laugh and it will seem like a real Rosh Hashanah meal because I'm a real adult who can coordinate this sort of effort.
In my festive reverie, I issued five invitations to my Rosh Hashanah dinner party. My friend Melissa asked what she could bring.
A main course?
My brother, who is definitely the chef in the family, laughed a little when I invited his girlfriend and him to dinner. He promised to come over early and actually cook the food for this dinner of mine. As our mother always says, the important thing is being together.
I considered being offended. Then I weighed the other option of touching raw meat.
Be here at 3, I told him.
Look, I'm just a vegetarian trying to be accommodating. My ideal holiday meal does not include chicken. But I recognize that offering guests a boneless breast might just make my party legitimate. I scribbled down the name of the marinade my brother instructed me to buy.
That left, well, everything else for me to make. I asked myself, "What would Grandma Esther do?" Suddenly I knew: start with the pickles.
Growing up, I would go to Grandma's right after Rosh Hashanah services to help her prepare for the big family lunch. My job was to slice pickles.
So, there in my own kitchen, I dove into a pickle jar -- willing the soup, carrot ring, and knishes to magically appear, like they always did at Grandma's house.
The last time -- also the first time -- I tried to make matzah balls, I molded the batter into clumps about the size a matzah ball should be. Nobody told me they would expand in the boiling water. I wound up with one matzah ball, bigger than a human head.
I felt like a pro this time, as I sculpted small bits of batter, knowing exactly what would happen when I plopped them in the pot. It worked.
Riding a chef's high, I decided to cook green beans the fancy way, with water chestnuts and crispy onions, like my mom makes.
It's easy, she told me. Just toss everything into a casserole dish and bake for 40 minutes.
I was with her, right up until the part about the casserole dish. Don't have one of those. Come to think of it, do I have six dinner plates?
As I set my wobbly, four-person dinner table with six placemats -- four black-and-white-checked, two pink-and-green plaid -- I recognized for the first time the great benefit of a bridal registry. It seemed my party would be so much more cheerful with wine glasses and silver serving pieces.
What a moment of clarification. Right as I'm about to be given this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to collect adult kitchen things, I get the urge to create Rosh Hashanah in my home. I'm beginning to think like a grown-up, married person.
Nice to know the instinct comes before the fancy dinnerware.
I pulled off that Rosh Hashanah meal, mismatched plates and all. The matzah balls may have been spilling out of my dinky tin pot, but they received rave reviews.
I called home to share the success with my mother. She cried. Kvelling, this time.
Send comments to Allison at Singlstyle@aol.com
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