Matzo balls, that is.  Also from scratch, in homemade chicken-vegetable soup, my version.

Traditional seders of yore always started with a giant cauldron of Mom’s chicken soup and large, substantial cannonballs, plus the obligatory HB eggs and gefilte fish, misc. symbolic seder foods, then the main uber-course, including multiple meats, kugels, etc., not to mention those horrible Pesach desserts, add sacred syrup and “real” wines, and by the time you forced down some token afikomen, you felt like a quivering mass of hardening cement.  Forget about “the after-meal entertainment”.

Then you turned around and did it again the second night, only with new additions.  Fond memories of family  pressure to overindulge, probably compulsive compensation for all the millennia of fear of going without.

As a kid it always bothered me that we could be so pampered and spoiled, while so many people just a town or two away were poor and even homeless, just by being born into unfair disadvantages.  But I was the black sheep, what did I know?

These days I have to keep it simple and cost-effective, and appreciate every little thing we are able to enjoy.  I live with someone who never had a lot to begin with, so she doesn’t take anything for granted.  It’s a new world of actual food, for her, a revelation.  It’s like an education for both of us, coming from opposite sides of the same coin.  Thus, a hearty bowl or two of homemade matzo ball soup is a feast.

Moral: when life gives you mud and mortar, make–balls!