My MIL just drove back home today. She has been staying with us since Sunday helping me get ready for Passover. We cooked all of her mother's recipes from Kastoria, Greece. These aren't the "traditional" Passover foods that most American Jews are familiar with. That's because my MIL's family was Sephardic (Spain, Portugal then Middle East after the Spanish Inquisition), not Ashkenazi Jews (mostly Europe). Kastoria is a little village and sometimes it was in Greece and other times it was in Turkey - just depended on who had more power that year.
We made: pastel (a meat pie using crushed matzah for the bottom and top crusts), albondegas soup (little tightly packed balls of matzah that has to cook 2 times --- this took 2 days to prepare!) and finally apricot candy for dessert. This required 90 minutes of constant stirring of the apricot candy mixture over the stovetop so that it wouldn't burn. Look what a pretty color it turned out to be!
And this was the dinner table before our guests arrived:
We invited a friend and her two little girls to dinner (her husband was away on a business trip) - this was such a new thing for them to see, and "strange" food. I made sure to have a more "typical" main course to serve: pot roast with potatos and carrots! I missed having my FIL there, but he had to go to Kansas to stay with my BIL because my SIL is in the hospital and someone needed to take care of my niece and nephew. But other than that we had a very sweet dinner.
Oh, and Tuesday night I took my MIL with me to doll club - she had a lot of fun looking at the variety of dolls everyone brought for show-n-tell. And she even won a little doll at raffle to take home with her!
I hope everyone has a Happy Passover or a Happy Easter!
