Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite food blogs, Smitten Kitchen, and Deb, the blogger, says in one of her posts that the sour cream coffee cake she makes could be the dish that made her now husband realize she was The One. She said that after she made this cake for him, shortly after, he asked her to marry him. And so began their journey cooking and photographing together in their tiny Manhattan kitchen. The coffee cake became the reason he married her, or so she wants to believe.

I thought about this in the context of me and Chris. Since we have moved in together about three years ago now, I’ve made so many different things that I can’t really keep track of what has been his favorite. I’ve made more use of this teeny tiny kitchen than probably anyone else in the history of this building even existing. This kitchen has seen some crazy three-day process dishes, as well as complex pastries like croissant. I asked him if he could name a dish I’ve made for him that he’d say was the one he’d name as the The Dish, and he said that I rarely make the same thing twice, so it was hard to name. Now that I think about it, the only real repeats this apartment has seen are banh xeo, appam, Kerala chicken stew, banana bread, pumpkin bread, pad thai, and different versions of oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies and fried rice. Nothing else has ever been a repeat.

It’s hard to repeat a dish when there are infinite recipes out there on the internet that I’ve bookmarked, as well as too many cookbooks here in the apartment that I neglect as a result. I guess Chris can’t name a favorite dish because they’re all his favorite dishes since I made them. 🙂