So what to do with all that crunchy stuff? We have resorted to using matzah during the summer for lechem mishna at Shalosh Seudos, but no one will eat a bite more than they have to, which inevitably means that half the matzah goes right back into that big brown box that lives on top of my breakfront until our matzah stash is finally depleted.
At one point I posed the question on Facebook and asked if anyone had any creative solutions. An Israeli cousin told me that she just wraps up her matzah and saves it for the following year. I wasn’t really planning on taking her advice, but that year we had four pounds of matzah left over. Now you do the math. Price a pound of hand shmura matzah and then multiply that number by four. Could you in good conscience toss all that matzah? Okay, maybe you could. But I certainly couldn’t. So one day, when no one was home, I took the matzah boxes, tied them up really tightly in garbage bags and hid them on top of a closet where no one would see them or question what they were. Towards the end of the winter, I quietly told my husband to order four pounds less matzah than we usually do and when the matzah order showed up, I stealthily added the boxes of vintage matzah to the stack. Quite frankly, the newer matzah didn’t taste any better than the old, but somehow someone got wind of my little experiment and not surprisingly, no one was happy about eating matzah that was now celebrating its first birthday. With no other choice, I offered the matzah to my cleaning girl after Pesach and discovered that she happens to love matzah.
This year, it was just after Sukkos when that big brown box of matzah started to really get on my nerves. There were no whole matzos left for Shalosh Seudos purposes and, in fact, there was really less than half a pound left. It was time for the box to go. Too embarrassed to offer my cleaning girl matzah from six months ago, I put the matzah on cookie sheets and popped it into the oven to freshen it up a little before pulling out my food processor and grinding the entire business up into matzah meal. What was probably the equivalent of about five matzos was reduced to half of a sandwich bag’s worth of matzah meal, taking up far less space in my pantry and allowing me to finally get rid of the last matzah box. Within a week the matzah meal was gone, transformed into knaidlach. Based on the selling price of hand shmura matzah, they were probably the most expensive knaidlach I have ever made, but at least I can say that we finally, finally used up every last crumb of matzah.