In this second installment of “Gearing up for Pesach”, we’re providing a few tips on specifically how to prepare your kitchen and pantry for the joys of kosher for Passover recipes and cooking. Again, these tips are meant for advance use, not the final days. If you wait to do these things until the Seder meal is upon you, you are guaranteed to feel stressed and frustrated year after year.

1. As we mentioned in Part I, it is important to prepare all your cooking utensils in advance of the holiday. This means checking to make sure you have all your pots and pans, plates, cutlery, and other essentials ready to go, as well as bringing all your new items to the mikveh well in advance of Passover.

2. Many ingredients we use all year round are also kosher for Passover. Take some time to do an inventory of your kitchen, and separate out all your unopened kosher for Passover foods, such as canned goods and unopened beverages. This way, you won’t re-buy the products you already have on-hand.

3. If you don’t already have the following essential Kosher for Passover ingredients on-hand, start stocking up on them early. They will be one less thing to worry about when you are doing last-minute shopping:
1. Matzah meal
2. Matzah Cake meal
3. Potato starch
4. Spices, Salt, Pepper, & Sugar
5. Wine & Grape Juice (both for cooking and drinking)
6. Semisweet chocolate

4. Start getting your Passover menu ready well in advance. This means both for the seder meals, and for all the other Passover meals you will have over the course of the holiday. Even if you don’t normally plan out your week’s worth of lunches and dinners, it will be very helpful to have a plan before the holiday begins so that you have one less thing to worry about in the days leading up to it. Collect kosher for Passover recipes together in a single folder from family, friends, old cookbooks, and of course, www.gourmetpassovercooking.com!

While Passover is still a couple of months away, it never hurts to start getting ready early. Many families start thinking about their Passover meals and Passover recipes as early as possible to get a jump start on shopping and stocking up their pantries. When the real preparations begin, such as completely cleaning out the house and starting to prepare your seder meal in earnest, you’ll be glad you thought to get some of the little things out of the way in advance. In this series of blogs on gearing up for Passover, we’ll be providing some tips and ideas on how to think about your Passover menu and ambiance well in advance of the inevitable chaos that ensues around the holiday itself.

First off: some house-cleaning tips.

While this is a Passover recipes website, one cannot ignore the necessity of cleaning the home in as stress-free a way as possible, so as to leave enough time and space to actually prepare the seder meal. In the spirit of stress-free cooking, here are a few quick tips on some ways to keep your home Kosher for Passover well in advance of the holiday itself:

1. Stop allowing ANY food out of the kitchen and dining room at least a month and a half in advance. That includes the car.
2. Once you have banned food in the bedrooms, you can start some of your cleaning in those areas any time before the holiday. Do little things like checking closets and drawers throughout the weeks leading up to Pesach, so you won’t have to worry about that when the holiday arrives.
3. Check out your Pesach supplies, and make sure you are all stocked up on essentials like cooking utensils, new toothbrushes, paper goods, and Yom Tov clothing. These kinds of things should never be left to the last minute, when all you will care about is cooking those delicious Passover meals.
4. If you buy any new cookware, bring it to the Mikveh right away, as it will get very busy as the holiday gets closer.
5. Try using one of those Pesach cleaning schedules that are everywhere in books and on the internet nowadays. Some of them may go a bit overboard, but you can tailor them to your needs. Keeping a good schedule can do wonders for your time-management.