How much do smells rule your life?
The ones we love, the ones we hate.
For me, the most wonderful smells revolve around food. I do love my food. There's the usual suspects in the love column - freshly baked bread, a roast cooking in the oven, garlic, a baking cake. But I do have one strange one, I'm interested to see if anyone else is as obsessed with this smell as I am... fresh parsnip. I used to work in a fruit shop when I finished high school and when the crate of parsnips came off the truck the cool room would smell so so very delightful for the next few hours. These days, whenever I peel a parsnip I always (and MR will attest to this) hold up the parsnip to my nose after peeling it and stand there inhaling its fresh aroma for a good thirty seconds with an expression of bliss on my face. Odd, I know. It's not a childhood thing, I don't remember ever being served parsnip as a child but I just love the smell of it.
And then those smells that I cannot stand. The food ones (because there would just be too many otherwise). Cooking mushrooms. Yeuch. Dad used to do a big mushroom fry up in the kitchen, filling the frying pan with just mushrooms. The whole house would Stink. For Hours. Raw meat sometimes has a very unpalatable odour (and I can't stomach eating lamb that tastes like the smell of a shearing shed) Coffee is another thing I cannot stand the smell (or taste) of. And burnt toast makes my nose crinkle.
What about you? What foods do you love the smell of? What can you not stand? And do you just love the smell of a freshly peeled parsnip?
NB. I am cooking a lamb rack roast tonight with, you guessed it, parsnip. Tonight's raw meat smelled very oddly of coconut. That's a first for me.
3 comments:
Yes, parsnips smell beautiful!! I hate the smell of Mutton birds cooking and the cooked bird too. Yuck, it's horrid.
Smells are extremely powerful at evoking memories, much more than the other senses: a smell, fragrance or scent can transport you back to an exact time and place.
I lobe the smell of home made mint sauce, raspberries, vanilla too. Yum, I love vanilla!!
I'll have to smell a parsnip again, I don't use them very often but I do love the taste of them. I love the smell of baking biscuits, freshly squeezed orange juice and cooking jam. And if I had to pick something I didn't like the smell of cooking is kangaroo meat, yukko. :)
Can't say I can recall what a parsnip smells like...will have to go and find out now! We used to have them roasted but I have never much liked the taste. POPCORN, that must be one of the best smells in the world. That and fresh made chocolate cake. :-) I hate corned meat but I do cook is every so often because the rest of the family loves it! (I just breathe thru my mouth!)
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