Our Seder was a smashing success. Highlights included Kit asking "Why is this night different?" and then immediately pointing to Hannah's partner and saying "Logan!" (it's true, having him over for dinner does make tonight different!), X and Logan deciding that Elijah is in such a hurry to visit all the houses that he doesn't have time to go to the bathroom, Hannah reminding us all not to lick our pinky fingers after we dipped out wine for the plagues, J carefully putting on an apron to protect his nice shirt while he was cooking and then forgetting to take it off before sitting down to dinner, Kit finding the afikoman at the exact right point in the Seder by pure coincidence (they were wandering around playing with their dolls and spotted it), and me singing "Mi Chamocha" to the tune of "The Wellerman".

X: Do you pee behind bushes like Elijah?
K, scornfully: I pee in the toilet!
R: Invite gentiles to your Seder, they said! It'll be fine, they said!

Kit was really good for the whole evening, delighted to have extra people to play with and reasonably engaged by the pictures in the haggadah even when they didn't much care about the story we were telling. They ignored most of what was on the symbol plate, though they did suck all the salt water off the parsley leaf before rejecting the parsley itself, but they went to town on the matzo ball soup—a far cry from last year.

Our cooking plan went perfectly, and of course we made far too much food. The symbol plates were generously laden, and we went through the service so fast that we hadn't had time to get really hungry, so we had matzo ball* soup with my homemade stock—so damn good, never doing it any other way ever again—and GF matzo balls and meticulously slivered celery and carrots, and then had no room for actual dinner. We decided to take a break and do a round of clean-up to buy ourselves some digestion time. My grandparents had a tradition of Elijah bringing gifts of knowledge, a.k.a. books, to all the kids, and of course I'm happy to continue that tradition, so Kit was well entertained by a collection of Daniel Tiger bedtime stories while the rest of us bustled around.

* Why do I want to spell it "matzah" when I'm talking about the flat cracker form but "matzo ball" for the soup form? Transliteration habits are so weird.

Once the table was cleared and reset, each of us managed a small bowl of lamb or chicken stew and a couple of pieces of chocolate and a nibble of afikoman, and then we called it quits. Kit skipped the stew and just had chocolate; apparently the going exchange rate is 1 afikoman = 1 piece of chocolate-dipped marzipan. We'd meant to steam asparagus, but there was no time and we couldn't have eaten a bite of it anyway. It'll keep for tomorrow, or whenever we're able to think about food again.

For the last few weeks I've been shifting to lower-carb eating and smaller portions, so I'm super extra stuffed and feel no guilt whatsoever. It was a most excellent feast.

Kit often finds it hard to listen to people singing, but when I put them to bed, they let me very quietly sing "Eliyahu HaNavi" while rocking them and listening to the rain, just like in their delightful More Than Enough picture book (from which this post's subject line is taken). It was a very good end to the evening.

As for the omer count, I'm thinking of folding a little origami flower every night, and stringing them into a garland when I'm done. My room needs more decoration and it feels like a nice way to celebrate the growing season.

My mom and her husband managed to catch a three-week cold a few weeks ago—that's definitely what it is, just an ordinary rhinovirus, and their pulmonologist is mystified as to how it's hung on this long—and they're on the mend but haven't had a chance to do any Pesach prep. I was very chuffed to make and deliver Seder plates for them, including lamb shank slices that are frankly large enough to be the main course. (We braised them in wine and spices, because my family tradition is to give each person a symbol plate and to eat everything on it, and roasted bones are very symbolic but not very edible.) I thought I'd miss having a Seder to go to tonight, but it felt appropriately holidayish to do this mitzvah instead—and to get to really hug my mom for the first time in a year.

Kit saw me packing things up, said "Gramma's not feeling well, I need to cook", and put on their apron; they were a little disappointed to learn that all the cooking was done, but they carefully helped me put the care package together. They're such a sweet kid.

Tomorrow we'll have a "second" Seder that's actually our first, in person, with our governess and her fiancé. They'll get here mid-afternoon so we can cook together, and then we'll see whether we can get Kit to actually sit through a Seder. We have the PJ Library haggadah, which is pretty accessible (though I don't like its English translations of the blessings at all and will substitute my own), and we've been practicing finding the afikoman by hiding some of Kit's toy matzah. They're capable of saying "Why is this night different from all other nights?" but not of doing it on command, so we may try all reciting it together, or doing repeat-after-me. The youngest person is supposed to ask the four questions, but nothing requires them to do it alone.

And a month from now, we'll do a Pesach Sheni with my mother and brother and stepfather and stepsister, in person, because by then I should have been able to get at least one dose of some vaccine or other, and it will be as safe as it can be to dine outdoors together in what I hope is beautiful late-April weather. It feels very appropriate for it to be a Pesach Sheni; I want to write off the whole past year as tamei from being in close contact with death, and it will feel like a make-up not just for this year's Pesach but last year's too.

Chag sameach to everyone celebrating, and chag kasher v'sameach to those for whom it's meaningful!

( Our cooking plan )

I've taken our Airtable meal plan to the next level with an inventory table. I did a full inventory and reorg of our upright freezer (long overdue). I'd love to do the same with our fridge and pantry, but it's hard to find the time, so I'm settling for adding things as we put them away or as I notice them. When I make the meal plan on Sunday night, I put "leftovers or ordering in" instead of a specific food, and list some inventory options. When I make the associated cooking plan, I note which inventory ingredients go into whatever we're cooking and build a shopping list for whatever we don't have in inventory. Then even less thought is required during the week.

Of course, this only works if the inventory is up to date, but I'm doing all right on that front so far. And if I go a week or two without updating it, it's still pretty easy to catch up.

Knowing what we have makes me much more eager to use it, especially now that I'm adding perishables. This week we need to use up the meat from a rotisserie chicken, so for Tuesday lunch I'll put it on a frozen pizza crust—bonus, I'll use up the open jar of tomato sauce before it goes fuzzy—and Tuesday dinner can be pasta with the rest of the chicken and whatever's in the open container of pesto. Iron Chef My Fridge is fun!

We probably won't do any bulk cooking next weekend because X and J will be recovering from their second vaccine shots, so the following week we'll be very glad to be well stocked and well organized. After their first shots we did a whole week of not cooking and mostly eating from the fridge and freezer, and by the end of it we gave up and ordered in just to taste something freshly made; it was very satisfying to clear out so many things, though.

My other food-related project is slowly moving all of our recipes into Whisk, which will build a grocery list for a given meal plan and also do nutritional assessments. I'm still happy with Airtable for the nitty-gritty of meal planning, but Whisk is aces for recipe organization.

On a meta level, it feels really good to have the mental wherewithal for this. Even a couple of months ago, there's no way I could have managed it.

I'm looking for a meal planning app/site that:

* Works on a Mac (browser-based is fine)
* Lets me put in my own recipes
* Doesn't count calories/calculate nutrition, or lets me turn off that "feature"
* Calculates portions consumed and remaining
* Ideally doesn't suggest other recipes (I don't know why I'm shocked that most meal planning apps are in fact meal plan apps that tell you what to make, but that is not what I want)
* Ideally makes shopping lists
* Realizes that at a single mealtime, different people may be eating different things

That last one seems to be the sticking point, and I don't understand why! Surely the need to pack children's school lunches or accommodate a picky eater is not unusual. But all the screenshots I see have a single recipe for every meal of the day, as though everyone in the house is going to eat Easy Strawberry Parfait with Granola for breakfast like it's a sitcom. This isn't the same functionality as being able to add side dishes to the menu; dishes need to be specifically assigned per person per meal. Otherwise Monday breakfast will say "Omelette, smoothie" and I won't have any idea how many omelettes and how many smoothies we'll be making.

Regarding portions consumed and remaining, I want to be able to start the week with, say, 16 servings of chili, and allocate them throughout the week—but only to me and J, because X doesn't eat chili, and on some days I might have chili for lunch while he has chili for dinner—and know how much will be left to freeze at the end of the week. If we plan to make six servings of pasta on Tuesday, I want to be able to allocate four of them for dinner Tuesday night and two more for lunch the next day. I can use Airtable for most aspects of meal planning, but not for this one.

Am I going to end up writing my own app or doing this in Excel or something? Why is this so hard?!

EDIT: I figured out how to do it in Airtable. Grarh.

I was going to call this "how not to make a pumpkin pie" but that title is taken, so I stole a phrase from that story--which is wonderful, and you should all go read it--for my subject line instead.

Tonight's gluten-free dairy-free pumpkin pie recipe:

0) Assemble all ingredients. Preheat oven.

1) Put dough ingredients in freezer to chill.

2) Make filling. Taste filling. Make a face like this:



Determine that the store-brand tinned pumpkin had soaked up too much metal flavor from the tin. Regretfully throw out the filling. Turn off the oven.

3) Go out to dinner. While out, buy organic pumpkin in a box (not a tin).

4) Assemble all ingredients. Preheat oven to 450F.

5) Make filling. Taste filling. Approve.

6) Attempt to make dough even though the coconut oil has now frozen entirely solid. Manage it with the help of the trusty Cuisinart food processor.

7) Grease the pie plate with a bit more coconut oil, since yesterday's quiche (made with the same dough recipe) stuck to it a little. Roll out the dough. Attempt to neatly transfer the dough to the plate. Mostly succeed. Patch up the holes.

8) Pour the filling into the plate. Put it in the oven. Set timer for 15 minutes, after which you intend to reduce the heat.

9) Notice that smoke is filling the kitchen. Quickly determine that the coconut oil used to grease the pie plate bubbled over the edge and is now burning on the floor of the oven.

10) Shake baking soda over the oil and see whether that does any good. Learn what burning baking soda smells like. (Spoiler: terrible.)

11) Remove pie from oven. Turn oven off. Start toaster oven heating at 350F, since it was more or less 15 minutes. Give up all hope of the custard setting properly. When the toaster oven has heated, put the pie in the toaster oven--on top of a foil-lined baking sheet, since you are capable of learning.

12) Clean the oven floor.

13) Timer goes off. Pie is not remotely done. Heat the oven to 350F and confirm that there is no more smoke. Put the pie in the oven. Belatedly remember to turn the toaster oven off.

14) Ten minutes later: pie not done, according to a toothpick, although the top is dark brown. Also bubbly, in a fizzy-tiny-bubbles sort of way. You have no idea why.

15) Ten minutes after that: declare the pie as done as it's going to get. Put it on the windowsill to cool. The filling almost immediately breaks away from the crust. Of course.

16) Chase the cat off the windowsill. "Trust me, kitty," you say, "you don't want this pie. Probably no one wants this pie."

17) After a suitable amount of time, cut into the pie. The filling resembles Indian pudding autumn pudding in taste, texture, and color; it has the classic curdled consistency of a broken custard. The crust is soggy and mealy on the bottom and overcooked around the edge. A puddle of coconut oil rapidly fills the gap left by the "slice" of pie.

18) Decide to put the pie in the fridge, mostly for a sense of closure. Lift it up and discover that the cork trivet is glued to the bottom of the pie by coconut oil. Reach for paper towels and realize you never replaced them after using up the roll cleaning the oven. Get more paper towels. Wipe off the bottom of the pie plate, put a sheet of paper towel in the fridge, and put the pie in the fridge.

19) Write up a version of the recipe that you think will actually work. Vow to try it... tomorrow.

20) Go to bed.