A few months ago, I invited a few of my goyish friends over for a Passover seder. Aside from my husband, none of them had ever experienced a seder, let alone Jewish food. To my surprise, they didn’t really know much about the story of Passover, in general, making it all the more exciting.
Growing up with a mother who loves to cook and entertain, I inherited the itch to experiment in the kitchen and 
serve great food to my friends and family. There’s something special about creating an amazing meal and sharing it with the people that are important to you. Every time I eat over at Mom’s for dinner, I get the constant questioning of “Do you like it? Do you like it?”. I sometimes get annoyed because I just want to eat my meal, but i understand the feeling of wanting to make your guests happy.
It was our first real dinner party since we got married allowing us to finally take advantage of the nice dishes, serving platters, multiple sized wine glasses, and fancy silverware we received for our wedding. One of my favorite parts of entertaining is setting up the table. I dressed it up with flowers, cute water pitchers, a seder plate and the seder handouts (more about that later). The setting felt right, a soundtrack of Jewish music (thank you Klezmatics) and strong smells seeping out of the kitchen.
My husband decided to make the brisket (responsible for making the house smell edible) and definitely should’ve read the entire recipe a few days prior to see what he was in for. It’s a lengthy process, requiring constant presence in the kitchen. So for those of you interested in making brisket, don’t wait until 9pm the night before a party the next evening to prepare it. Nonetheless, the brisket was outstanding and worth the stress. Lesson learned for next time.
I was in charge of all of the other traditional dishes. Homemade matzo ball soup, gefilte fish made with smoked trout and whitefish accompanied with a horseradish sauce, and charoset which is comprised of apples, walnuts, cinnamon, honey and Manochevitz, a kosher sweet red wine. 
The seder kicked off with a few prayers for wine (Jews sure know how to pray), and we took turns reading out loud the story of Passover from my much abridged version of the Haggadah while eating lots of Matzo and horseradish. Passover is celebrated as a commemoration of the Jews being freed from slavery in Egypt, so we learned about the symbolic foods and their significance by retelling the story of the big Exodus.
Our guests were fascinated with learning more about Jewish culture and very open to trying food they weren’t so used to eating. Gefilte fish doesn’t sound like the most appetizing dish as it’s often described as a gelled dumpling over cabbage, but everyone complimented it as a big hit, and I won them over by not serving it out of the jar. Everyone enjoyed the food, especially my husband’s winning brisket.
As the night continued on, we all arrived at the conclusion that we wanted to learn more about different types of cuisine from around the world. So we named off several different types of cultural cuisines and wrote them on individual pieces of paper. One person from each of the three couples reached into a bowl filled with the pieces of paper to find out what they were responsible for cooking at our next gathering.
Russia, here we come…
