Reduction

This one word describes my life this morning. I know that’s a broad generalization, a sweeping statement, but it’s a pretty big, adequate word. This morning has been, kitchen-wise, to quote the great Barney Fife, “Big. Real, real big. There’s just no other word; it’s big.” (I guess you’ll have to watch that episode to get it, sorry).

I feel like I should feature on a survival cooking TV show after the morning’s cooking escapades. If I were as cool as Pioneer Woman I would have had my camera out and taken shots off each step and the final products. But I'm lackadaisical about those kinds of details in the morning when I'm hot and pregnant and haven't had my coffee yet.

This morning I tackled homemade pancake syrup and pizza sauce without recipes. Not in the same pot. Breathe easier now. The internet and power were down, so there was no Pinterest to rescue me. Thankfully the syrup was relatively easy: water, sugar, brown sugar, a splash of vanilla (thanks to some unknown, nameless volunteer who came and brought us vanilla. Your reward will be great in Heaven), a couple teaspoons of homemade butter, and boil, boil, boil. Pre-breakfast, and while we were eating the pancakes, it was pretty watery and runny. I hadn’t let it reduce enough, mostly because there wasn’t enough time before the guys had to eat and leave. I put it back on the stove after breakfast, and boiled it until it was all foamy. When I poured it into the plastic syrup bottle, the heat warped it (oops), but the bottle, battle-scarred as it is, valiantly strains to stand upright with its new contents, which more closely resemble caramel now than syrup. Oh well. One of these days I’ll get the cooking time and quantities reconciled.

I opened the fridge to find that the pizza cheese, a prized find at the supermarket here (for the uninitiated among you, Asians don’t do cheese, so finding cheese in such a small town was very happy thing), had MOLDED. Yuck. Our 14-hour-a-day power cuts have been working their magic on our refrigerator with dire consequences. In the U.S. I would just cut a bit of mold off and keep going, but for some reason today my insides rebelled and so the cheese remains sitting rejected on the countertop. So much for my enthusiasm for making pizza for the American pastor guest we have. I didn’t want to serve him something so apparently compromised, so while Sonu and I may get up the nerve later to carve off the green goo and move forward, I don’t think our pastor friend is missing pizza to the point that his stomach needs to face a potential disaster when on already precarious ground just being in India J.

Anyway, that’s all back-story for the pizza sauce. With about 1.5 pounds of ripe-to-bursting tomatoes sitting expectantly on the countertop, I knew there was nothing to do but move forward with the pizza sauce part, even if no pizza was in sight for the near future. So I cleaned, chopped, and simmered them for a bit, pureed in the blender when the power came on and strained them through a small tea strainer—slow, but effective—and sautéed garlic and onions. Then I put it all back in the blender and repeated, adding salt and black pepper, a splash of sugar and red pepper (this is India, after all ;)), and bay leaves, and simmered again for a few minutes. The end result is pretty good, though I’ll be more careful with the salt next time. We don’t have parsley, basil, or oregano here, so it doesn’t exactly taste Italian, but as close as we can get at this point.

The common denominator in all this, in case you couldn’t see the tie that binds through my detail laden recollections, has been reduction. Reduction of the syrup from runny to thick. Reduction of juicy, watery tomatoes to thick, smooth paste. Reduction of my expectations and palate for meals today from complex to simple. The latter was the hardest by far, of course. Thank God for His patience in continuing to bring dross and unwanted things in my character which obscure His image to the top of the “pot” in my life and straining them off so that the most important reduction can happen, which is this: “He must increase, I must decrease.”