Pizza Night

After over a month of a diet consisting almost exclusively of lentils and potatoes over rice, besides the occasional yummy from our care packages (thank you parents! You have no idea what a difference those make!), the VISpas decided it was time to introduce some classic American (or, I guess, Italian) cuisine to SECMOL. So last Sunday we had pizza night! After scouring Leh on our last trip in for cheese (thank you Bo, who went to no less than five different stores) and tomatoes, we returned to SECMOL campus pumped and ready for action. We began at 9:00 Sunday morning, washing and chopping tomatoes for what turned out to be the biggest vat of tomato sauce I had ever seen. Throughout the day, VISpas wandered in and out of the kitchen whenever we had a spare moment to see what needed to be chopped, grated, kneaded, or rolled. Once the sauce was simmering away on our solar cooker, we mixed flour, salt, yeast, and water to make a ball of dough about the size of a large beach ball. Becky lent us sizable amounts of basil and oregano from her own private stash and at 4:00, the first shift of VISpas headed into the kitchen to commence the actual assembly of between fifteen and twenty pizzas. We topped them with cheese (which comes only in cans here), onions, more basil and oregano, and Mr. James, in an act of incredible generosity, donated a stick of his own personal pepperoni on a pizza especially for the VISpas which was devoured in approximately 16 seconds.

As the evening progressed, the pizza making process got increasingly ridiculous as VISpas began to decorate the waiting pizza crusts with dough animals, hearts, stars, and other whimsical objects. Nicole and Emery took it upon themselves to fashion an entire alligator out of dough (which we baked and set free in the Indus the next morning). American music played in our little kitchen from 4:00 straight through until 10:30, and the atmosphere was as lighthearted and energetic as I had even seen it. It was without a doubt, exactly what we needed to really come together as a community and on top of that, the Ladakhis LOVED it!

By the end of the night, all of us were so full that we were essentially incapacitated. We collapsed on the benches in the kitchen, unable to move or speak in complete sentences, the word "pizza" bringing a wave of nausea over all of us who had eaten more than any of us cared to calculate. Of course, the next morning, upon learning that there were leftovers, we decided to forgo the chipati and dal offered to us, opting instead for the bits and pieces of pizza we were too sick to even think about the night before.

-Nora