Passover Prep

So now we have cleaned our house and checked our beauty supplies. What about cooking? Our rabbis have said that if you even intentionally eat one tiny bit of chometz on Passover, you have broken the laws of Passover. Many people will own a second set of dishes, pots, pans, silverware, glasses, even spices to ensure that not one speck of chometz enters their Pesach cooking. In fact, some (very large) homes will even have a separate Pesach kitchen! For those of us who can't afford that, we just place a special plastic board over our cooking surfaces or aluminum foil to ensure that not even a spec of chometz touches the food.

Household Goods

There are a lot of places that chometz hides. Many people strive to clean all those places to ensure the house is clean. Some Jews will do a large load of laundry before Pesach to ensure that there is not chometz on them. And the sheets... oh the sheets. I just love having breakfast in bed, don't you? Well, there might be some crumbs there... gotta wash those sheets nice and fresh for the holiday! I know parents who find peanut butter on toys and half-eaten sandwiches in the playroom... don't forget to clean those toys or decide what would be "Kosher for Passover" to play with and keep the other ones off limits.

One thing that I always find funny is when I crack open the Haggadah (the book we use on Pesach) and find year (or many year) old matzah hiding in the pages. The key here is to make sure chometz from books doesn't end up on the Passover table and to bang out each book upside down before you read it to be sure it is clean.

Part of the cleaning process is cleaning the nooks and crannies. We pull up the couch cushions and vacuum the cracks. A good vacuum in all the corners and a wipe down of the non-cloth chairs as well as the counters and cabinets is key. Wipe down your doorknobs and your cabinet handles as well as the fridge handle. You can wipe down the fridge shelves or pull them out and put them in a bathtub of ammonia water.

One easily overlooked spot is the rubber seal on the fridge door. A wipe down with a cotton swab dipped in ammonia water is called for here. Now, the oven... this is an easy one (if you have a self-cleaning cycle). Just run the self-cleaning cycle and you are good to go. Look and see if there is anything rubber in there. If there is, just place some foil around it. As for the range, to kosher it for Passover, you must lay some foil down. And many people think the vent above the stove is a breeding ground for chometz mixing! So some refrain from using it.

The microwave is a fun one. Put a bowl of water in there and turn it on for 30 minutes or so... let it steam the inside of your microwave and wipe it down.

That sounds like everything... except for the kitchen sink! If you have a stainless steel sink, you can douse it in boiling water and then pour some strong drain cleaner on the drain of the sink to clean the top of the drain as well as the pipes themselves. If you have a porcelain sink, it can't be koshered. It is too porous. They do sell plastic sink inserts though! Don't forget to clean your faucet and handles too!

Don't forget to mop your floor with ammonia and empty your vacuum bag (chometz breeding ground, I tell you)!

But I Just Bought That Loaf of Bread

It happens every year. Two, three, five, eight days before Pesach you are at the grocery store and those Oreos look good... and so does that French baguette... what about that 2 liter of soda? I know that I certainly would not throw away food and food banks won't take open boxes (with good reason)... so what do you do with chometz that you can't/won't get rid of?

It is a simple and brilliant solution. Sell it. Now, I am not saying that you need to have a yard sale for half-eaten food. Let me explain. Take all that chometz... cookies, crackers, bread, anything not marked Kosher for Passover, and put them away in a special cabinet. Seal it off (in my house we use masking tape) and sell it to your (non-Jewish) neighbor. Some Chabad houses will have a form you can fill out allowing the rabbi to sell your chometz on your behalf or just type up one on your own. Come on, it's fun! Your friends can own a cabinet in your house for a week. Just type up a simple sheet of paper that says you are selling the chometz to whom for how much and how long.

The chometz is generally sold for a token amount, like one dollar. At the end of Pesach, it is purchased back by you for the same price. Some groups believe that you shouldn't sell edible chometz, but that isn't always feasible. It's a very good alternative to flushing it down the proverbial toilet.