Happy Passover

Wednesday evening was the start of Passover, and we celebrated with a few other people.
This photo shows the ritual items: the matzoh, the lamb bone, the egg, horse-radish root,
and the greens that symbolize spring. Matzoh reminds us of our ancestors’ exodus from Egypt.

At the table.

Another view of the ceremonial items, as well as the gefilte fish that we
like to have as part of the meal.

Our main course was Chicken Marbella, a 1980s favorite that I had never cooked before.

Gefilte fish (photo by Alice).

What it all means: From 2007

In 2007, I wrote a child-friendly explanation of the symbols on the Passover plate. Here it is again in case you would like to see it. We celebrate the same way each year (you might notice that it’s even the same tablecloth). Back then, I was writing for Miriam and Alice who were small children. Happily, Alice was with us in person this year!

In the spring we celebrate the Jewish holiday called Passover. We have a special ceremony called a Seder, and we tell a story about Jewish history a long, long time ago. To tell this story, we have special food on the table. The picture shows the table from last year.

At the Seder, we tell the story of how the Jews were slaves in the land of Egypt in this long-ago time, and how Moses, their leader, helped them to escape. We celebrate freedom and the coming of spring.

Moses and all the people ran away from Egypt so fast that they didn't have time to bake bread, but ate a flat bread called matzoh. For the holiday of Passover, many Jewish people do not eat any other type of bread or crackers for 8 days, because they want to remember the story.

When the Jewish people were slaves, they had to work very hard making big buildings for the Egyptians. On the Seder plate is a special fruit jam called charoses that tastes very good.

Charoses looks like the mortar that holds a brick or stone building together, and we eat it to remind us of the lives of the Jewish slaves who worked on the buildings in Egypt.

The next special food is called "bitter herbs," or horseradish. This is a very bitter, sharp-tasting root. This taste makes all the people at the Seder remember the hard and "bitter" lives that the Jewish people had when they were slaves around 3000 years ago. They make us remember that freedom is a good thing.

One part of the Seder is to eat matzoh with some charoses and ground-up horseradish on it, and remember the bitter and the sweet parts of the story.



Salt water on the Passover plate makes us remember the tears that people wept when they were not free men and women.


The egg on the Passover plate reminds us that spring is here.
Parsley or other mild-tasting green herbs is also on the Seder table to remind us of spring. Another part of the Passover celebration is to eat egg with salt water and matzoh, and to dip the parsley in salt water.


Also on the Passover plate is a bone from a lamb. We also drink wine as we tell the story.

When Moses helped the Jews to escape, the first thing they did was to cross a big sea named the Red Sea. Here is the magical part of the story: the water of the sea opened up, and everyone could walk between the walls of water.

While they walked, Moses's sister sang and danced to help them on their way. Her name was Miriam, and she has an important part in the story. After all the Jews crossed the Red Sea and escaped from slavery, they lived in the desert for a long time. Miriam had a magic well so that wherever they went, they found water to drink. Even though the desert is a very dry place, Miriam's magic well was always with them.

 Photos © 2007, 2026 mae sander

March in the Kitchen

 New in My Kitchen in March

New Mug Rack that Len made for some of our many mugs.
Len has been doing a lot of woodworking.

We have been using the new tray for many meals… such as this patè, cheese, bread, and chips.

Good Meals in March

We cooked at home for most of our March dinners. Here are photos — some new, some you’ve seen earlier this month. 

At Home

… and another roast chicken!

For Saint Patrick’s Day, of course.

We frequently have tuna salad in one form or another.

Alice made us some classic chocolate chip cookies.

Len made Pad Thai — super good!

Another meal that Len made.

Bacon on Special

I needed a few strips of bacon for classic Boeuf Bourgignon, so I went quickly into a Kroger store.
They had a special: buy one package get one free. So we have had about a year’s worth of bacon this month!

A Take-Out Meal: Food from the Himalayas

At Slurping Turtle 

Miso Soup

Seafood plate.

Sashimi with raw tuna and vegetables.

Final March Reading (not in my kitchen)

I’m not sure I’ll keep reading this in April.
The first 200 pages have been disappointing. I expected more from
Diana Wynne Jones.

Shared with Sherry’s “In My Kitchen” 

Blog post and photos © 2026 mae sander

More Beautiful Weather

 

Crew-rowing teams practice in the Huron River.

The trees of course are still bare, but the sun was shining this morning.

A new walking trail along the river was opened last fall, with this path under the railroad tracks.

Inside the tunnel are metal cut-out murals of the wildlife in the area.

Photos © mae sander 2026

An Early Spring Flower

 

No Kings Ann Arbor

 

Addendum: News Article about the Protest

Photos by Len and Mae Sander © 2026

Food and Other Stuff

 

Len is doing great cooking again.

This Week’s Mona Lisa

Did you say art? You must mean Mona Lisa.

Recent Reading

I lost interest in the middle of this thriller.

‘

The thirteen stories in this collection vary quite a lot, and several of them differ from the novels of Louise Erdrich that I have read. I enjoyed them all. I’ll pick one example, the story titled “Borsalino,” in reference to a particular type of hat that the narrator wears.

The hat: “a soft brown Borsalino, with a wide grosgrain ribbon band
and a generous brim.” It has a very special hat band made of snakeskin.

This story takes place in Venice during two trips that the narrator takes, quite a few years apart. On the first trip when she’s a student, the narrator is befriended by a local man named Enzo, who offers to be a guide…

“So I took the thief’s tour. In through cracks in walls, squeezing around or climbing through damaged gates, we wandered through ornate gardens and empty apartments. Enzo seemed to know everyone who was keeping the city going, from the bakers to the garbage collectors. He knew his way into shuttered shops, the secret areas of churches, cloisters, ancient palazzi. Servants let us sleep on couches hidden from sunlight, under sheets, or wander in the bishop’s residence. We ate bread and cheese in tiny private gardens, sipped from a bottle liberated from a merchant’s fabled wine cellar. Over the days we went to the islands. In Murano, he blew glass with the glass-blowers. In San Lazzaro degli Armeni, he greeted a monk who let us into the library. Enzo spoke, in a language I had never heard before, to a mummy, tranquil and stern, a neighbor of the monk. We went to Isola San Michele, the island of the dead, and wandered into the oldest part of the cemetery, filled with blackened angels and tilted vaults.” (p.99)

It’s clear that Enzo is very special and has a strange place in the world of the cemetery — especially in “ a cozy mausoleum” where he shows her an old mattress in a crypt. And seems to sleep there. “My hat rattled, as if the snakeskin in the hatband had come alive and moved.”

On the second trip, things are a little different. The author has her husband and children with her, and they start the day normally…

‘I went back to Venice another time. It was about sixteen years later, over a decade into my first marriage. We went with two of our children, both girls, seven and eight years old. I had them keep a travel diary for their younger sister, still at home, just a toddler. In the hotel where we stayed, near the Accademia Bridge, a lavish breakfast was served. The girls listed everything on one page, drew it on another. They were enthralled by the tall glasses of blood orange juice. They drew the arrays of folded meats and pallid cheeses, the puffy pastries, pots of jam, giving each a letter grade.” (p. 101)

But then things turn dark. Enzo, she learns, is not human. He’s a spirit that has lived in Venice for centuries. Further, the hat, which she’s brought with her on this trip too, turns out to be a kind of a magic hat, especially its snakeskin hat band. 

All the stories have something special in them.

Blog post © 2026 mae sander

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