Too bad it's only once a year

Yesterday the girls and I drove to a neighboring state to find a grocery store I'd heard was the place to get Kosher food in the area. We went to visit my friend JT afterwards, since she lives over that direction. That was a lot of fun.

The trip was a great success. The store had quite a variety of Kosher for Passover items, almost all kitniot-free. Kitniot-free is a big deal for us, because it means that the food can have no trace of soy or corn, among other things. It was amazingly easy to find foods free of all our allergens.

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Most of these products are available only for a few week around Passover, and aren't produced the rest of the year.

I was so excited to find such a variety of foods and other household items we can use. Things like single-serving juice for the kids, ketchup, soda pop, breakfast cereal, candles, toothpaste, dish soap, potato chips, candy, pickles, marshmallows, canned goods and juice. I was especially excited about the ketchup and pickles. They're made with no vinegar at all, either apple or corn, so I'll be able to eat them for the first time in ages.

And the mixes! Cake mix, muffin mix, pancake mix and more. I thought I'd never be able to cook from a ready-made mix again. They were expensive, so I just bought a few for special occasions. The potato stix and the Crispy-O's cereal were the main things I bought quite a few of.

I even found some soups and pre-made meals we can have. You have no idea of the excitement and the feeling of luxury--to actually be able to eat food that someone else cooked! Hooray!

The store has a Kosher meat counter and a Kosher deli, and carries a lot of meats and other products that are Kosher for Pesach year round. That means I can get lamb, beef and free-range chicken that I can trust. Much of it is less expensive than the local butcher, and, unlike the meat in stores closer to home, the beef and lamb is grass-fed. We still have about a quarter to a third of the meat we bought from a local farmer in our freezer, but once that runs out the Kosher meat counter is going to be quite a boon.

The store didn't have some of the baking supplies I was hoping to find, such as vanilla, baking powder, white distilled vinegar, flavoring extracts and food coloring. But I found a lot of things. We've been sampling them over the last two days, and most of them are really good.

Baby E's favorite thing so far has been the juice. She is just beside herself with excitement that there are little squeeze packets of juice with little bitty straws, like she sees other kids drinking, and she can have them! The straws seem to be narrow enough to avoid causing aspiration issues, and Baby E loves them. I was a bit nervous giving her the juice because it contains ascorbic acid, which is normally something grown on corn that causes reactions for her. But she drank the whole packet and she didn't even get slightly red cheeks--amazing!

It was amazing to actually have so much selection that I couldn't buy everything they had that was okay for us. Usually when I find something ready-made that we can have, it's such an unusual event that I buy whatever it is. There's never more than a handful of available options to choose from.

I filled two shopping carts to overflowing with a year's supply of OU-P foods. The girls were getting tired and a bit whiny toward the end, but it helped that people kept stopping to talk to them.

I was so impressed with the other people that were also shopping in the Kosher for Passover sections. Most of them seemed to know each other and would stop to greet each other and chat. Many of them said hello to us and asked where we were from, since they didn't recognize us.

They were so very warm and friendly--happy to answer questions, engage us in conversation, and quick with offers of help. Even when they found I wasn't Jewish, they were sympathetic and eager to make suggestions for finding foods free of corn and soy, explain symbols on the packaging, and help me learn how to pronouce words like Ashkenazic and kitniot.

I tend to feel a kinship with Jewish people, because--at least from my perspective--we worship the same God, we read the same Torah, and our faith shares the same roots. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are the forefathers of my faith too, even though I'm not descended from them by blood. I grew up on stories of the prophets and heroes like Joshua, Samuel, and David, and strong women worthy of emulation like Ruth, Esther and, of course, the woman described in Proverbs 31.

My Lord was a Jew, and His message and salvation came first to the Jew, and then to the Gentile. The New Testament speaks of those Gentiles who follow Christ as having been adopted or grafted in to the family of God's children. The Jews are God's chosen people, but we get to share in that heritage by His grace.

I'm afraid this must be highly offensive to those Jewish people who do not believe Jesus is the Messiah--the fact that I feel I have a kinship with them because of my faith. It must be a bit awkward to have someone feel such a brotherhood when, from your perspective, it's worse than non-existent. To them, I'm sure it seems a blasphemy. To me, the thought of sharing such a widespread and diverse family community is a lovely one.