Ever since she made croquets in Spain, Chelsea was adamant that we should make matza balls for Passover and celebrate it. I, the jaded jew, really like Passover but definitely wouldn’t go through all the effort if she wasn’t that into it. Leading up to Passover, she kept asking me about ‘the balls.’
Some preliminary research has shown that there wasn’t any matza flour – the main ingredient in the balls – in Tbilisi, so we thought long and hard and tried and messaged people and called people to find it, but to no avail. I was ready to give up. But Chelsea never lost hope: she kept wanting it and believing in it and claiming that there must be a way.
That’s when I thought of… CHABAD. This cool Jewish organization and religious movement works all around the world and helps jews with stuff. I don’t know why they do that exactly. Because they’re nice and want to bring us closer to god.
These people had no matza flour, because for them, it is forbidden to eat Matza Shruya – a matza soaked in water – and matza flour soaked in water counts as that too. But they agreed to send us a whole bunch of other stuff, basically an all-you-need-for-passover kit, and that included matzas that we could grind ourselves into matza flour! Plus, they sent us all of that with a Georgian guy in a black car, for free! Thanks guys!
Have you considered…
That there are two types of flour in the world??
These can be categorized as:
a. Flour that makes the thing that’s in its name.
and,
b. Flour that is made out of the thing that’s in its name.
For example rice flour is made out of rice, but it cannot become rice.
On the other hand you can grind cakes all day long, but good luck getting any cake flour out of that.
Matza flour belongs to group b. You can’t make a matza with it, and you get it by grinding matzas into dust.
The nice lady that is our landlord gave us a cake mixer and her son that is also our landlord gave us a hand mixer, and so I took the matzas and made a huge mess but eventually succeeded in grinding them into a flour!
So we made matza balls with the flour, I made a nice Jewish-style vegetable soup to put them in, Chelsea made awesome latkes out of carrot and beets, and we ate lots and drank wine and talked to my family in Israel on Zoom and read the story of how the Jews ran away from slavery in Egypt two thousand years ago. Hurray!
Latkes are on the right (we ate it with sour cream).
And in the middle another Passover staple: hard-boiled egg in salt-water.
Chelsea thought it was too weird, I think it’s the best thing ever.
The story of Passover (It’s called a Haggadah) has a lot about plagues and things, so it was amusing to read it during Coronavirus. I also got sad as we read the story and I thought about the shitty things that Israel does to the Palestinians today, in the name of national security and national PTSD.
Stop it, you dumb Jews. We were enslaved in Egypt, we were killed in the holocaust, and now we’re turning around and taking away the freedom and lives of another people ourselves.
Anyway, matza balls in soup are very tasty.