This week is a special one to Christians and Jews alike.  From Palm Sunday to the celebration of Easter, the week is full of events.  Honestly, this week has never meant so much to me until this year.  Why?  What makes this year so special?  Well, this is the year when my family decided to celebrate the Biblical holidays.  Therefore, we celebrated Passover as well.

Passover really enriched our understanding of this week.  Thank you, Robin Sampson, for compiling the great book, A Family Guide to the Biblical Holidays.  It is a wonderful resource that makes celebrating these holidays simple.  I learned so much as I read from this book aloud to my family concerning Passover.

There are so many ways to celebrate this holiday.  There are traditional ways and a simple way.  The part I like most about Robin Sampson’s book is that she constantly reminds you to not get wrapped up in doing it right and lose the fun.  Believe me, I had to remind myself several times.

Some families use lamb; some do not.  My children were excited about trying lamb for the first time so we chose to use lamb for that reason.  It is hard to find lamb.  I finally found some grass fed lamb from a relatively local farmer and purchased two racks of lamb.  I have a friend who is South African by birth.  She advised me on how to prepare the lamb and what to serve with it.

The night before Passover we searched the house for leavening.  I purposely hid 10 pieces of bread around the house.  When all the pieces were found, we took them outside and burned them.  We decided as a family to not eat anything with leaven in it on Passover, but we did not carry it over for the full seven days.  We might observe the full seven days of the Feast of Unleavened Bread another year, but for us it was going to be too stressful.

In A Family Guide to Biblical Holidays, a Haggadah is given to aid families in going through the Seder meal.  Essentially a Haggadah is a script for the family to follow.  It makes the Seder meal extremely easy, especially when you have no idea what you are doing.

For our Seder meal, I made unleavened bread.  It was my gluten-free sandwich bread recipe given in my Texas Homesteader Wheat-Free Cookbook.  But, I simply eliminated the yeast.  I sprayed a cookie sheet with olive oil and spread out the dough.  It made a large rectangle.  I poked it with a fork all over and baked it for 20 minutes at 375 degrees.  Then it cut it into bread sticks.  I was surprised how good it tasted.

I had both red wine and grape juice.  We had the traditional and symbolic foods like bitter herbs and salt water.  For our meal, we had roasted lamb with yellow rice and green beans.  I made my Crustless Apple Pie (also in my cookbook) for dessert.  I posted a very similar recipe in the article, “Pears“.  We had a gluten-free Passover feast.  It was delicious.

The week before Passover, we read and learned all about it.  We already knew the history of Passover with God freeing the Israelites from Egypt.  We knew the reason for eating unleavened bread.  We were very familiar with this bit of history.  We also reviewed the Last Supper with Jesus and His disciples.  And together you see the beauty in all the symbolism.  Everything is so filled with meaning; it is truly poetic.

I am not going to tell you all that I learned because then you would not be able to discover it on your own.  It would not mean as much to you.  But I will tell you this, celebrating Passover is truly a meaningful event.  Happy Passover!  Happy Easter!

Tags: Biblical Holidays, gluten free passover, rack of lamb, Robin Sampson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at 5:14 am and is filed under Food Allergies, Homeschooling, Homesteading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.