(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Yesterday was an unbalanced and unbalancing day.

My dad's cousins organized the tombstone unveiling for my great-aunt and great-uncle, who died about a month apart last summer. The unveiling was out in Philadelphia. I drove over to my parents house and we drove down together in the morning. After the graveside ceremony, there was lunch and watching the Masters finale and reflecting on two amazing peoples' lives.

I got home around 3PM feeling exhausted. I'd hoped to get most of my Pesach cleaning done, but I managed less than hoped. This also is hard to plan because of Pesach falling on a Friday this year. Normally, if I convert the kitchen over on Sunday, I only have to make do without a kitchen for a couple chametzdik days before Pesach starts, but this year I was reluctant to fully commit to the conversion and be without a kitchen for a whole week. I cleaned and put away my chametzdik dishes yesterday, and plan to use paper/plastic the rest of the week, but I haven't put away all my cooking utensils yet and I think I'm going to clean/convert more and more of my kitchen each night in gradual stages. If that works out, great. If not, Thursday's gonna be frantic. :P

Comments

[wendylove]

Hahahaha. Yeah, we have the Chametz Corner (complete with toaster oven and Instant Pot) and I haven't kashered the dishwasher so I can run one more load of all the dairy stuff we're using, but then the hot water urn died so now every time I want to make tea I have to nuke or heat water in a Pesach vessel then pour it into... yeah, this is ridiculous.

[hannah]

A while ago, someone told me she was - at least in retrospect - happy she'd had less than a week to prepare for Pesach and the seders. Because it meant she knew she could do it in that time. It's nice to have more time, and be relaxed, and it's good to know you can make it work under pressure.

[Edited for icon use.]

[(Anonymous)]

Out of interest (non-jewish person, obvsly) - in what sense do you have to 'convert' your kitchen? Has this to do with being kosher, or something else entirely. Having 'to do without a kitchen' sounds stressful.

[seekingferret]

As I've discussed a bit in some of my daf yomi posts, cooking utensils are considered in varying degrees to absorb foodstuffs they cook in them. How much absorption is considered to happen depends on the materials cooked, the utensil material, the temperature, and a few other factors. But in any case, cooking with a utensil that has absorbed a particular kind of food is then capable of transmitting the ta'am, the taste of that food, to new foods cooked in the same vessel.

This means for example that you can't cook meat in a pot that was used to cook cheese, because the absorbed cheese ta'am in the walls of the pot transfers to the meat during cooking and violates the prohibition on cooking meat with milk. And similarly one can't use a pot that was used to cook unkosher meat to later cook kosher meat, because the ta'am of the unkosher meat will transfer to the kosher meat.

And therefore in the case of Pesach, where we are forbidden to eat foods that have leaven in them, we cannot use cooking utensils that have been cooked with leaven over the course of the year.

There are a variety of strategies for dealing with this.

In some cases for some materials, utensils can be heated to the point where the absorbed ta'am is removed and they are rekashered and can be used on Pesach. So part of the conversion process is cleaning and kashering what can be cleaned/kashered (This post on Star-K gives an idea of how involved that can be).

In other cases, this can't be done and the easiest solution is to just not use those utensils over Pesach. People have a separate set of dishes that they trade in for use over Pesach, they put Pesach-only covers over work surfaces that they will use for food prep, etc... This is the second major part of the conversion process.

And the third part is the obligation to not just not eat chametz, but to not have any chametz in the house whatsoever. People eat what they can in the week(s) before Pesach, throw out what they can't eat and are not allowed to own. There is also a halakhic workaround where you 'sell' certain kinds of forbidden foods to a non-Jew for the length of Passover, and then purchase them back after Pesach. You keep these foods in your house, in special designated areas that are blocked off from access, and since you don't own them you don't violate the mitzvah. And along with this is a general cleaning because even crumbs of chametz are a problem, so one does everything they can to remove crumbs and there's a special ceremony the night before Pesach where one ritually searches the house with a candle and thereafter declares that any remaining crumbs are like dust and should not be considered.

[amnisias]

Sorry, that anon post was me.