Making a Cheesecake…Jungle Style

 

The kids love to take funny pictures… here is one of them reviewing their shots and a few of their photos…

Taking a brief detour from our normal format here, I thought I (Elizabeth) would share a little ‘kitchen lore’ from the jungle.  How DOES a mom make a special dessert for Christmas when her family lives 50 miles from the nearest road and is in the middle of a 3-month stretch with no supply flights?

Well.  The most obvious thing you need is cream cheese.  Luckily for us, the mission store had it in stock back in November.  In FOUR POUND BLOCKS.  Now, like most foods they have very little exposure to, my kids tolerate cream cheese only in very small doses.  No way we would get through 4 pounds before rot set in.  Thankfully, my co-worker Maggie wanted some for Christmas baking as well and so we split it and I threw my hunk into the freezer…way back in November.  The night before the big cheesecake event, I lovingly measured out what I would need and hacked it off into a bowl to thaw in the fridge.

No graham crackers are available in country, but I ‘required’ a chocolate dessert and so Noah crushed up a small package of Oreos, improbably imported from Indonesia, for the crust.  Somehow butter got left off of the last supply order and we are ekeing out a pound over the next 2 months, so a leeeeeetle bit of butter went in as well.

Thankfully there are few other ingredients in cheesecake!  Standard procedure at our house is to break EACH egg separately in a small bowl to check for rotten eggs (only a month into our 12 week stretch, so the eggs were still all good, hooray!) before adding them to the bowl.  Nate took a turn beating on the now-thawed cream cheese when he came up from the office to grab a fresh cup of tea.  Pre-frozen cream cheese tastes great but is LUMPY.  Some sugar, a little flour, and the piece-de-resistance – a half cup of precious chocolate chips from the United States, melted and swirled in with the batter.

Our oven is tiny, just 13” square inside.  Thankfully I had cut down to a 2/3 size cake, so the ingredients all fit in a pie pan…which fit in a 9 x 13” pan with a layer of water.  No cracked cheesecakes allowed! 

And the end result…a delicious treat that everyone over the age of 10 thoroughly enjoyed during our Christmas get-together with our co-workers.  Hardly any lumpiness.   Wish we could have shared it with you all.

As Nate wrote at Christmas time, this week was a heavy week for us as we grieved the death of a young mother and chose to trust in God’s loving sovereignty.  Life is going on…while deaths are usually fairly rare and we certainly don’t make a cheesecake more than once a year here, the things you can smile at in my kitchen are part of our lives daily.   The next time you are baking, will you pray for me that I will know when to leave my kitchen and go out to visit with the Pal friend walking through on the trail?  And, conversely, when to leave the village and go make some special treat for my kids or for us to enjoy as a family?

This week I was reminded that the verse so many of us know and have on our walls and coffee cups:

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

is actually missing the second half of the verse:

“I WILL be exalted among the nations,

I WILL  be exalted in the earth.”  Psalm 46:10

May we be about His plans and purposes as we trust Him this week!