The Pan Is Too Big for the Food

Tonight we are making arroz con pollo in the smallest pan in the house, and the smallness is the entire method.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. In a small heavy pan with a lid, brown two chicken thighs in oil on both sides over medium heat, about four minutes a side, then lift them out. In the same pan cook half a chopped onion and half a chopped pepper for five minutes with salt, then two cloves of chopped garlic and a big pinch of paprika and a pinch of turmeric or saffron if you have any, for one minute. Add one cup of rice and stir it so every grain is coated. Pour in two cups of hot broth or water, salt it properly, and put the chicken back on top. Bring it to a bubble, put the lid on, turn it to the lowest heat, and leave it for twenty minutes without lifting the lid. Then off the heat, still covered, for five more. Check the chicken is cooked all the way through with no pink at the bone. Peas and lemon at the end. It feeds three, it costs a few dollars, and the crust on the bottom is a prize and not a mistake.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the rice.

It is the pan.

Every pan in your kitchen was bought for a bigger household. The wide one, the deep one, the roasting tray that takes up the whole oven. And now you cook a normal amount of food in them, and it spreads out thin across all that metal, and it dries, and it catches on the bottom, and it comes out worse than it should.

And here is the part that costs you. You do not think: wrong pan. You think something about yourself. A dinner that dried out becomes, in about four seconds, one more piece of evidence in a case you have been quietly building.

The day of small things has a verse of its own

There is a line in Zechariah that was spoken to people who thought what they were building was too small to matter.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth. (Zechariah 4:10, King James Version)

The setting is a rebuilt temple that was visibly smaller than the one before it. The older people who had seen the first one wept when they saw the foundation of the second, because it was so obviously less.

And God's response is a question with an edge on it. Who has despised the day of small things? He is not comforting anybody about a reduction. He is challenging the whole way it is being measured.

You are living in a day of small things that heaven refuses to despise, and God has never once ranked a household by the size of what it cooks in. Zechariah 4:10 answers a visibly smaller thing with a question rather than an apology, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and sets it beside a stove.

You have not been reduced in any way that matters, and there is no ledger in heaven where a smaller pan counts against a person. It is written that the eyes of the Lord run to and fro through the whole earth, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the chicken is browning.

The pan is a real problem, and it is only a pan

Now let me be practical for a moment, because there is an actual physical fact here that has been doing emotional work it was never qualified for.

A wide pan with a small amount of food in it will always cook badly. There is too much surface, the liquid evaporates before the rice is done, and the bottom catches while the top stays dry. That is physics. It is not a comment on the cook and it is not a comment on the household.

So the burned dinner that has been carried around all week was caused by a piece of metal of the wrong size, and nothing else. It has been recruited into a much bigger story that it has no business being in.

Food drying out in an oversized pan is not a verdict on anything except a pan.

You are not a worse cook than you were, and God has never once let a piece of cookware testify about a person. The passage refuses to let the smaller thing be despised and asks who is doing the despising, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an accusation out of a scorched pan.

You have been reading physics as a judgment, and that is an exhausting thing to do three times a day. Zechariah 4 is spoken to people looking at something visibly smaller and drawing conclusions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who interrupts exactly that arithmetic.

Buy the small pan, or find it

Here is the practical part, and it is not spiritual at all, and it matters more than most spiritual things I could say here.

Get a small heavy pan with a lid. If there is one at the back of a cupboard, dig it out tonight. If there is not, this is the one thing in this whole site worth spending a little on, and a small heavy pan with a lid can be had cheaply and lasts thirty years.

Because everything changes with the right size. The rice steams instead of drying. The liquid stays where it should. The bottom gets a crust rather than a burn. And the food you cook in it is going to be markedly better, immediately, with no change to your skill or your ingredients or your effort.

And a good dinner tonight quietly withdraws the evidence in that case you have been building.

You are one pan away from most of this, and God has never once withheld an ordinary practical answer from somebody who needed one. Zechariah 4:10 has God attend to the actual building rather than to the feelings about it, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts a practical solution into a person's hands on a Tuesday.