31 Mar 2015
By Mayim Bialik on Mar 31, 2015 at 10:00 AM ET
Spring has sprung, and with it: Passover! It’s most people’s favorite Jewish holiday and I can’t say our family is an exception. My boys love it; they love the added responsibility that comes each year from learning more of the Four Questions to opening the door for Elijah with as little trepidation as possible.
Where?
As a divorced mama, I am grateful to my wonderful ex and our wonderful way we co-parent.
We will be at his house this year since my kitchen has been demolished for a remodel. This is frustrating because I love cooking and preparing, and I will have to limit that to whatever cooking and preparing I do at the ex’s. Silver lining: there’s barely anything to kasher (make kosher) because I have no kitchen! The ex gets to do all of the kashering at his house!
Protein?
What do vegans who don’t eat kitniyot do for protein? Well, we first of all get educated about how much protein you actually need, and we don’t flip out and feel like we are missing out on nutrition if we don’t eat a hunk of animal protein at every meal. (Even developed countries that have meat as a part of their diet don’t get the same enormous amount of protein we get in our diets, and they generally speaking do not have the rates of cancer, heart disease, and obesity that we have…just sayin’…Read Dr. Ornish’s recent New York Times editorial to find out more about protein!)
We eat a lot of quinoa. We eat it with mango, cashews, basil, and lime juice (the recipe is in just about every kosher cookbook!). We eat it with “trashy” (i.e. there’s corn syrup in it) Passover salad dressing. We eat it with ketchup. We basically eat it any way we can. We eat quinoa for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or a snack at least once a day during Passover.
We also eat avocados: a fantastic source of protein and healthy fats. Yum. We mash it for guacamole, put it on a piece of matzah, eat it plain with olive oil and sea salt. Anyway, anyhow, the answer is always avocado.
We eat nuts. Almonds and walnuts are good. Almond butter is delicious. We eat trail mix, handfuls as a snack. We eat nuts and it’s good protein and no one is hungry, I promise.