Your 4-Part Plan for Passover Sanity

There are lots of four’s prevalent in this upcoming holiday–four sons, four questions, four cups–you get the idea. And in that spirit, I present your four-part Passover survival guide.

Don’t get me wrong, this holiday is one of our favorites, but it’s not easy. There are a few too many meals and a total overhaul to everyone’s diet. Following are four tips that help our family:

We don’t eat anything on Passover that we wouldn’t eat during the year. Skip the potato starch/matzah meal/egg concoctions and you’ll save money, time and calories. These dishes are never healthy or tasty.
Zucchini noodles are delicious sauteed with garlic and olive oil, year round.

Chocolate covered strawberries, made by my 11-year-old, beat matzah meal desserts any day.
Roasted vegetables are our best friend on Pesach. There is no limit to the vegetables we can roast, and they all taste amazing. We turn our oven to 425, chop up every veggie we can find, drizzle olive oil over it with salt, pepper and even some herbs. We mix and match and eat a variety of these all week.
Roasted beets, potatoes, sweet potatoes, rutabaga and rosemary.
Stock up on frozen fruit. We load up on Popsicle and smoothies over Pesach. We don’t eat them much over the winter, so it’s a pleasure to have them again. They keep the kids from being hungry all day, and frozen fruit with no additives doesn’t even need a hechsher on Pesach.
Frozen smoothies and Popsicles galore. We even refill the empty Tropicana bottle with a huge smoothie for Yom Tov.
Start with soup. We start every Yom Tov meal with soup (and sometimes, late at night, end it there). Soup is delicious, cheap, easy to make and fills everyone up. It’s a no brainer.