Chametz weekend

The Jewish holiday of Passover (Pesach) begins tonight. In preparation for the holiday, observant Jews rid their homes of all chametz, or leavened grain products. Being a semi-observant Jew, I spent a good portion of the weekend ridding my house of chametz. Many Jews sell their leavened grain products to a non-Jew and buy them back after the holiday is over. I've done that in years past, but now I use the opportunity to do serious spring cleaning in my kitchen. And serious carb loading. I ate pasta or cereal at every meal for the last four days.

Now, now. Before you get all upset about wasting food. I don't throw out much food; most of what I throw out is almost a year old, having been bought in the first half of the previous year. For a couple of weeks I've been working on eating all my chametz and not buying any more. What I ended up tossing was few things things like half used bags of flour and half gone boxes of pasta in the back of the pantry. After tossing spoiled things like that I had only a few granola bars, a can of soup with noodles, and one unopened box of whole wheat penne that were still edible. A nieghbor happily took them off my hands. After the cleaning, I went outside and made a small bonfire of old spaghetti and my kitchen was free of leavened products and clean for spring.