This is less a neologism, I suspect, than a new and eternally useful euphemism. The fact that it doesn't actually involve matzah balls is secondary to the basic anecdote.
The story -- which takes place on a day very much like yesterday in a location very much like Southern New Hampshire -- and involves a busy journalist -- very much like myself -- who was so absorbed with his work that he let the simmering chicken broth for the Passover matzah ball soup simmer and simmer and simmer until, over the course of an afternoon, it went from proto-soup to burnt sludge. In my defense, the simmering soup smelled delicious until the exact moment that it began to smell burnt.
Thus, 2006 goes down as the year that we had to rush out to the grocery story for canned condensed matzah ball soup for the Seder. Of course, the story couldn't end there. My mother, flustered by the fact that her eldest son came home for Passover and then proceeded to destroy the matzah ball soup, paid no attention to the "condensed" aspect of the two cans of matzah ball soup that we brought home, which led to the serving of three bowls of impossibly salty broth before the addition of water.
So in any case, I'm not sure how you would use the phrase "over-reducing the matzah balls" in a sentence without following it up with a leer and "You know what I mean?" But I wanted to blog something and I want to ignore Bucky's "American Idol" departure for as long as I can.
And now, I'm off to over-reduce the matzah balls, if you know what I mean...
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