Tonight, I have a candle-lit dinner with...


...Dum dum Dum dum...

...Martha.
And Francois - my other roommate.

Francois was not originally in the plan (which explains why there are only two plates in the picture). But he came home at the right time. Let us give him credits for that.

Nor were candles planned.
Nor, in fact, was a dinner together planned.

It must be the summer weather, the stuffy apartment, and the papers awaiting both me and Martha that prompted a spur-of-the moment decision in our study room, accompanied by unusually spontaneous dash down to the supermarket (which, by the way, SUCKS), followed then by extraordinarily swift coordination in our kitchen. In no time (well, actually, in about an hour - we aren't really THAT good at cooking after all), the candles were lit up (so that we didn't have to turn on the burning hot floor lamp) and the following dish was ready to be served:

Hmmmmmmm... Black bean and rice salad.

5 minutes to dinner time, when tomatoes were about to be added to the salad, the door facing the kitchen was flung open and in walked Francois. We thought adding tomatoes to the dish would deter Francois. But we were Oh! so wrong.

After all, it's a delectable delightful dish: colorful, eclectic, uplifting, and luscious. Just what a salad is supposed to be.

And this is why if a dish is named after me, it will have to be a salad dish. Probably this black bean and rice salad, but I'll have to think of a fancier name for it. This reminds me, an 'old' friend of mine since high school, McQuixote (麥吉.疴得), once commented that I'm the type of vegetable that's better served crunchy and raw, therefore not too appealing to the traditional Chinese palate...

Later tonight in the kitchen, when Martha was doing the dishes and Francois making the dessert bananas flambées, I entertained. I entertained by asking them what kind of dish they would want to be named after them.

Francois obviously picked a Norwegian omelet, which in France is a dessert, called Omelette Norvégienne. He gave the following reasons for his pick (repeated verbatim):

"one, my favorite dish is the dessert"

"two, I like this feelling of hot/cold (it is a cold cake but you have tu burn it) maybe it represents my charactere... quite shy and cold at the beginning but when you know me... i'm not shy and cold, more the contrary..."

For me, I see more of the resemblance between the shape of the dessert and the color and spikes of his hair.

Martha, on the other hand, wavered.

The first thing she mentioned, however, was that the dish had to have something to do with avocadoes. I'll therefore either settle with Guaca-Martha-Mole (which, by the way, is one of Martha's signature dish) or work her into a prix fixe menu, featuring a sundry of random foodstuff she enumerated. And just when I thought I was really original and clever, I found the picture on the left by doing a simple google image search on 'martha mole'...

What about you, my friends? If a dish is to be named after you, what would you want it to be?

Don't think too hard! Be spontaneous! What's the first dish that pops up in your mind? How does the dish look like? Smell like? Taste like?

May be one day, you'll find your name on the menu of my little bistro.
Alongside Omelette Norvégienne de Francois and Guaca-Martha-Mole.

Note: Like previous posts, pseudonyms are used throughout.