Last updated 7:15 a.m. ET on 26 March 2000.

Physical Preparation for Pesach

We start preparing for Pesach when we start thinking about Purim, which falls a month before Pesach every year. We start using up the stuff on our pantry shelves, particularly the baking supplies. We think before we purchase any number of items like cereal, pretzels, and peanut butter - will we use it all before Pesach?

We have a calendar for Pesach preparation that we'll share with you. We got it years ago and refer to it every year even though we don't follow it exactly.

Calendar for Pesach Preparation

We originally got this calendar from the school Miriam attended for Kindergarten. We'll present it first pretty much as we received it, then share our comments about this schedule with you.

Four Weeks Before:

• Do not buy or open new items like pickles, jams, flour, etc.
• Use up old stocks, especially refrigerated items.
• Look for and shop for Pesach staples that run out quickly, e.g., spices, ketchup, mayonnaise, preserves, oil, macaroons, grape juice, etc.
• Plan menus and shopping lists.

Three Weeks Before:

• Order meat, wine, and any special candies.
• Begin spring cleaning, starting with areas farthest from the kitchen, then ask family members not to take food into these rooms.

Two Weeks Before:

• Clean living room and dining room areas, then don't eat in them.
• Buy any dairy products that require certification and store them in the refrigerator in separate wrappers clearly marked for Pesach.
• Buy the rest of the Pesach supplies.
• Arrange to sell chametz.

Last Week:
The following schedule must be adjusted for Shabbat, with the work scheduled for the days before Shabbat being done one day earlier. B'dikat chametz is performed on the evening before the first seder.

• Day 6: Finish cleaning rest of house; prepare dishwasher.
• Day 5: Clean kitchen and change dishes.
• Day 4: Shop for fresh food - fruits, vegetables, fish, etc.
• Day 3: Cook for seder - baking, salads, dressings, etc.
• Day 2: Cook for seder - soup, meats, side dishes except last minute vegetables. Perform B'dikat Chametz (the search for chametz) in the evening.
• Day 1:
  • Eat no real matzah before the seder.
  • Burn chametz before noon.
  • Set table.
  • Last minute cooking.
  • Seder!

Our Reaction to This Schedule and How We Adapt It

Four weeks before, we start looking at what we have on our shelves. We do our best to use up everything we can before Pesach so that we don't have chametz in the house. We usually go through all our food storage areas and prepare an inventory of food, which we then divide into something like the following categories: Food to use up or discard; unopened food we won't use and can donate to a food pantry; unopened food that we will sell to a non-Jew for the duration of Pesach.

We plan our meals between Purim and Pesach as carefully as we can to use up as much of what we already have as possible. If it looks like we're going to end up with unopened packages of things like cereal, pasta, flour, we set those items aside for Project Mazon, which distributes the items to food pantries in our area. Since we often buy in bulk, we always end up with a certain amount of food (often frozen) that it would be a significant financial loss to replace. This food we sell to a non-Jew through our rabbi.

These days there are a plethora of kosher-for-Passover items available that replicate virtually everything one eats during the year. We don't buy these, as a rule, so shopping for hard-to-find items like kosher-for-Passover noodles or muffin mixes rarely enters the picture for us. We do start buying kosher-for-Passover foods as much as a month before Pesach, mainly because we like to spread out the economic impact of changing all the food in the house as much as possible.

Three weeks before we do start a general scrubbing and cleaning throughout the house. We discourage everyone from carrying food out of the kitchen/dining area, but it is not yet forbidden. We need to do our final Pesach cleaning a little closer to the event because nothing will stay clean in our house for more than a day or so.

Our main activity at this point is determining what we're going to eat, who we're going to eat with, and what we want to do at the seder.

Two weeks before we start working toward the kitchen. The bedrooms are ruthlessly scrubbed, vacuumed, swept, polished, dusted. As we finish each room, we post a sign on the door so that we'll remember not to take in food.

The last week before Pesach we finish our shopping and cleaning. The areas we use most are left until the day before Pesach begins. Since the first seder is on a Wednesday night this year, we will spend Tuesday cleaning the kitchen/dining/computer/family areas, clearing out all the cabinets, and finishing our shopping. Any non-Pesachdik food in the house that has not been sold will be moved out to the mudroom.

We will search the house for chametz sometime after it becomes dark, then start washing and putting away our Pesach dishes. We traditionally eat a very chametz-dik breakfast on the day of the first seder - usually pastries and juice boxes in the mudroom. If we're lucky, the weather is nice enough to have this meal outdoors. Afterwards, we clean up and burn the leftovers as well as the chametz we found on our search the night before.

Then we go in, finish changing the kitchen if necessary, pause to catch our breaths, and start cooking like mad.

What Other People Do to Prepare for Pesach

Many people we know make a corner of their kitchen kosher for Passover and prepare foods in advance. We don't do this for two reasons - Joan could never figure out just how to do this, and we like the idea of commemorating our Exodus from Egypt by our haste in having to prepare everything on the last day.

Food Inventories and Menu Planning

Sometime in the month before Pesach, we go through all the food storage areas in our house and list what we have. We try to do this about three weeks in advance, but sometimes we're a little closer to Pesach when we begin. We go through the extra refrigerator, the big freezer, the closet where we store our bulk-buying purchases, the shelves going down to our basement where we keep things like cans and pasta, our brand-new pantry shelves, and our main refrigerator. Everything gets listed from the 25-pound bag of cornmeal we bought last month to the leftover macaroni and cheese from yesterday's lunch.

Once we have the list, we go through it and assign each item to a category. The category names vary, but they mean basically the same thing each year:

• Use up or discard - These are the food items we will either use in our regular meals and snacks before Pesach or will discard if we haven't used by the time we're doing our final kitchen cleaning. All leftovers go into this category, as do open supplies of things like cereal, cookies and crackers, flour, peanut butter, etc. If we have enormous amounts of something, we might ask around among our non-Jewish acquaintances to see if they are interested in two pounds of cornmeal, or whatever.
  

  What we don't eat or give away, we throw away. Over the years we have managed to keep the throw-aways to a minimum - a cup of flour here, a few pretzels there. If we have crackers, rice cakes, or other fairly discrete pieces of food left, sometimes we'll save them for the b'dikat chametz and burn them in the morning before the first seder. If we have whole-grain baked goods, open nuts or dried fruit in small amounts, or bruised fresh fruit, we'll usually give those to our outdoor animals -- well away from the house, of course.

• Project Mazon - This category is for unopened packages of chametz-dik food that we will not use before Pesach. For example, we might have a pound of pasta, a box of crackers, and a box of cereal among the items in this category. Local Jewish schools or synagogues usually take up a collection of these items during the week before Pesach and take them to a local food pantry. If we can't connect with the Jewish agency Project Mazon, we'll take the food to the library food collection point or directly to the food pantry in an adjacent town.
  
  
• Sell/store - This category encompasses all the stuff that we will not be using on Pesach, but want to keep and use after the holiday. Some of it is not chametz per se - for example, we usually have a case of tomato sauce in the basement - but it does not have a specific kosher l'pesach certification. Other food may be chametz - like the 25-pound bag of organic flour in the freezer - but we feel it would be a significant economic hardship to get rid of them. Or we may have food that would be okay for Pesach - like the organic raisins or the pecans or our spices- but we have already opened them and used part of the contents.
  

  All of this stuff is stored away from the daily food storage areas, usually in the basement near where we will put our year-round dishes. We will sell this food to a non-Jew for the duration of Pesach and buy it back after Pesach is over. This is a legal transaction and relatively complicated, so we give our rabbi the authority to perform the sale for us. Thereby, though the food may actually be stored within our house, it will not belong to us and we will not derive any benefit from its presence in our house.

While we are assigning food to these categories, we make a list of things we should use up in meals. A pound of fettucine, a package of hot dog rolls, a box of vegetarian chile mix, and three pounds of lasagne noodles means fettucine alfredo, smart dogs with chile, and lots of lasagne. Then we construct a menu plan to use up as much as possible (uh-oh, we can only fit in lasagne twice before Pesach, we'd better give the third pound of lasagne noodles to Project Mazon).

The last week before Pesach may include some strange meals - hot cereal for supper, pancakes for lunch (why did I buy TWO big boxes of pancake mix in February?), but this system works for us.

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