Brothers!

“Is Shmulik coming home this Shabbat?” my youngest son asked me.

“Yes,” I answered.

“Again?” he asked. “When is he staying a whole shabbat in the army?”

Well, I’m glad he’s coming home. Yes, we were used to Elie being gone at least every other weekend, if not more, and yes, with the holidays, Shmulik has been home quite a bit, but still!

“Chaim might be coming too,” I told my son. He confirmed that I meant our adopted son Chaim and not our son-in-law Haim (note the different spelling of the names, though they are pronounced the same) and when I said it was indeed Chaim, he answered “good.”

Go figure! His adopted brother gets a “good” while his natural brother gets an “again?”

And…almost every week for the Sabbath, we cook large meat meals. Jews are commanded to separate between dairy and meat and meat meals are considered more festive, so the weekends here tend to be meat. With so many teenage and just-post teenage guys around…it isn’t a meal if it isn’t meat.

The thing is, the holiday of Passover is filled with many of these festive meals and so after seven or eight days, you long to avoid meat. So, it has become a family tradition that the weekend after Passover is all dairy.

I’ve got my marching orders…Elie wants me to make…wait, I’ll list it: onion soup, fried fish patties, corn/tuna fritters, filet of salmon, lasagne, onion quiche, and homemade blintzes…

All I can think of is that if I have to make all that tomorrow…I’m going to bed now.

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