Davida Aprons offers a “Matzahmania Passover” collection including the items pictured, a matzoh wine bottle cover and a matzah ball cooking timer. Her items are available at local Judaica stores or at www.davidaaprons.com.

Students from Boys Town Jerusalem take part in the annual massive volunteer effort to sort and pack more than 2,500 Passover food parcels for needy Israeli families. Spearheaded by the grassroots organization “Nitzav Rafael,” the campaign is headquartered at Boys Town.

Since its founding in 1948, BTJ has provided disadvantaged Israeli youth with academic, technological, and Torah education from junior high through college. Boys Town’s 18-acre campus hosts more than 800 students. (courtesy boys town)

TnuvaUSA offers an assortment of kosher for Passover, non-kitniyot dairy products and cheeses available in supermarkets and grocery outlets throughout North America.

Tnuva’s products include an assortment of cheeses like the hard cheese, gourmet, Mediterranean, and soft cheese collections, as well as cheese spreads. There is also butter (salted and unsalted) as well as Tnuva’s best-selling kosher for Pesach pudding snacks, made with 100% real milk, no preservatives, and 0% trans-fat. Puddings are available in a variety of flavors including chocolate, vanilla, chocolate and vanilla, and chocolate and vanilla mousse.

Tnuva’s kosher for Passover products hold the strictest kashrut standards bestowed by Tnuva’s Vaad Mehadrin and the Orthodox Union in addition to the strict supervision of Chug Chatam Sofer of Bnei Brak. To find out where Tnuva products are sold in the area, click on the store locator icon on the Tnuva website, www.tnuva.com.

With all the restrictions, are decent desserts even possible during Passover?

“My particular talent is working around restriction,” says Paula Shoyer, author of “The Kosher Baker: Over 160 Dairy-free Recipes from Traditional to Trendy” (Brandeis University Press, 2010).

Her cookbook contains a chapter on Passover baking, as well as many sensational recipes sans flour or yeast — Passover taboos. Flourless Chocolate Cake, Marble Chocolate Matzoh, and Mocha Matzoh Napolean are some of the book’s gems.

Shoyer, whose magical touch is without peer in the Passover dessert genre, calls them “my gift to the Jewish people.”

There are two things you need to know about “Our Haggadah: Uniting Traditions for Interfaith Families,” one of the many new Passover haggadahs hitting the shelves this spring.

The first is it’s not quite a haggadah. The second is that it’s by Cokie and Steve Roberts. Yes, that Cokie Roberts, longtime senior news analyst for National Public Radio. She’s Catholic and Steve, her husband and a contributing editor at U.S. News and World Report, is Jewish.

What I mean when I say that it’s not a haggadah is that I cannot imagine any seder being conducted with nothing but copies of “Our Haggadah” for all the guests.

One of the biggest challenges of the Seder night is keeping your children engaged and excited throughout the Seder. Especially in the Internet Age, when kids are used to constant stimulation, it seems almost unfair to demand that your child sit through hours upon hours of Divrei Torah. Keep in mind that the more involved your child is in the planning of the Seder, the more he or she will want to take an active role. Below are a few tips on how to keep the kids involved during the Seder:

There are more than 250 Israeli wineries, and a Passover seder provides a unique opportunity to try a few Israeli wines you’ve yet to taste. It’s an enticing way to enhance the holiday meal for your family and guests. A progression of wines throughout the meal can simulate a wine-tasting and complement the dishes that will make a seder a more memorable event.

When selecting and serving wine, a few general traditions will serve you well. First, start with white wines and then progress to red. Also, serve lighter body wines followed by heavier wines and, lastly, offer sweeter wines after dry wines. Red wines are heavier in the mouth than whites and make it more difficult to appreciate them.

Purim is about costumes, out-rageous Purim spiels, and drinking until you can’t tell the difference between Mordechai and Haman, the hero and villain of the Purim story.

Or is it?

A number of American synagogues and Jewish organizations are eschewing, or at least downplaying, the drunken revelry to focus more on the socially conscious aspects of the holiday, which begins on Saturday night.