This year I spent Shavuot amongst thousands of people at the JCC on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a heavily young, Jewish neighborhood. For the first night the JCC as well as many synagogues host all-night programming such as lectures and discussion groups; the JCC also had live concerts, yoga, Israeli karaoke and of course thick slices of cheesecake! Coffee and chocolate candies were liberally distributed too, to keep everyone awake until 4 AM, when the last sessions ended. Unfortunately I could only keep my eyes open until about 1, and went home then.

A cousin had invited me for Shavuot lunch yesterday and it was a typical homemade Syrian dairy meal: green salad; quinoa tabbouleh; samboosak — savory, flaky pastries stuffed with munster cheese; noodle casserole with cheese calsonnes (doughy dumplings, stuffed also with cheese); baked salmon; spinach and chickpeas in a baked filo dough (kind of like spanakopita); and kousa jibneh, which is a squash and zucchini quiche sans crust. The eight of us ate very well! Incredibly, the enormous amount of food served was actually quite typical. Leftovers are a given and are usually eaten later for dinner or the following day.

Troubling, for me, is the Syrian custom of leaving all the food on the table during the entire meal which means I will end up picking at far more than I am able to eat! Case in point were my cousin’s homemade brownies; I ended up eating about five or six of them. Eeep!! Note to self and everyone else: don’t leave food in front of you unless you want to eat it all.

My cousin gave me leftovers of everything (of course) so my plan for the rest of this dairy-tastic holiday is to eat smaller portions and spread it out over the course of a couple of days. I’ll still be getting my dairy on, just not so intensely!