It was a busy day in the kitchen on Saturday! We tried to make a traditional Indonesian food called lemper. It was one of our favourite meals during our first year of language study on Java, but since then we have had a hard time finding good lemper on Borneo.
Chris, after driving all around on Saturday morning looking for the stuff, finally came home in a huff and declared that he would be making lemper today! And so we did!
We plucked banana leaves from our tree, steamed rice in our rice cooker, and thawed & boiled chicken. We stripped the meat from the bones, added a little bit of this & a little bit of that, and took the rice out of the cooker. Banana leaves were cut into square shapes, rice was patted into little patties on each leaf square, spoonfuls of chicken were placed down the centre of each rice patty, the rice was rolled around the chicken, and then the leaves around the rice ... Finally the little "sushi-like" packs were put in the rice cooker again, this time to steam until ... bon appetite! Or as I should say "Selamat Makan!"
Chris was going nuts ... talking about how we should open a warung up front by our gate and sell fresh lemper every morning. "People would be rolling in!" he exclaimed. "We'd be throwing lemper at them and they would be throwing money back at us! We could have a lemper factory! We'd need to buy 18 rice cookers and ... Let's go build the warung right now!"
We laughed and rolled banana leaves and dreamed foolishly and laughed some more! The kids, I'm sure, thought that we were serious.
That evening we enjoyed our lopsided lemper (but very tastey) on the back porch and were thankful to have had an enjoyable day as a family.
How crazy it would be for us westerners to attempt to be professionals at making an Indonesian food that many nationals don't even attempt to make. And then try to sell it in mass quantities. And try to make money here amongst people who are struggling to make money themselves!!
But how much more "crazy" was it that God left his throne in heaven to come to earth? Born in a manger, lived among the poor, healed the sick, saved the sinners ... died for us all ...
But God knew that only something crazy and totally out-of-the-ordinary needed to happen save our fragile souls. And so He dreamed up this incredible plan to save us ... out of His undying love for us!
And so my husband in his all-or-nothing attitude showed me a picture of God's lavish grace ...
What a crazy plan it seemed ...