Stone soup

To the highest level of surprise for me, Shariq said that we can make sandwich at home. Shariq is my new housemate in London. He is a guy from UP. To tell about him, he believes that he still lives in India. For him, food means spicy hot curry with lot of masala and pulses in it. Anything else like burger or bread is a side dish. And most importantly he thinks vegetarian food is a speciality that we can once in a while. He is always at such a high level of diversification from my views yet I like to make fun of him most of the time. Coming to the story, he always discourages at the idea of having sandwich for a complete meal. But that day, he himself suggested we can make sandwiches. So with much enthusiasm I entered the kitchen. Though I like cooking, I rarely try it. He asked me to cut vegetables first. We looked into the fridge to find what vegetables we have. There were few potatoes, onions and carrot. Now the biggest question is what we should use for the sandwich. While I was wondering what to make, Shariq suggested mixing some masala powders to the vegetable mix. Oops. Here we go again. "Shariq, sandwich is supposed to be plain vegetables. Not your curry masala in it". He came back with his usual reply, "It will be good and it's healthy. We can make aloo baaji too". I know where this is going. It will end up in some potato curry and we will have to eat the curry with bread. It will not be a sandwich. His name for this idea was "Indian Sandwich". I wonder if that's another name for "Shariq's masala baaji bread". My dreams of having a vegetable sandwich started evaporating. Determined not to leave my dream, we had an argument in which he said he will show me how to cook. Oh oh. I can just recall the old story "Stone Soup".

Somehow I managed to make his mind to work on cooking sandwich and not sabji. It took sometime for me to explain him that Sandwich is different from sabji. But still his recipe for the filling went on with masala powders and included chillies too. And to add more on that, we were frying the vegetables. I thought he is teaching me how to make stone soup. After an hour of cooking, we finally made the vegetable mix. It was neither a salad nor a curry. And we stuffed it inside bread along with ketchup. With triangular slices of sandwich stacked on the plate, we started the dinner watching the movie "The memento". I felt that I am having sandwich at last. Good day that it didn't turned to be chicken soup instead of stone soup