Uncategorized

Only seven more days to go in this challenge! Thanks to everyone who stopped by.  Your comments have been interesting and all the blogs I’ve visited have been instructive, amusing, interesting, informative, novel, thoughtful, colorful…my readers can add more adjectives! 0 0

I’ll bet you didn’t think rain has a smell, but I’ve always smelled something delightful with a fresh rain. There is a word, petrichor, derived from the Greek (petra, meaning rock, + ichor, meaning fluid that flows in the veins of gods), for the scent of rain on dry earth.  Now two Australian scientists, in an article for the journal Nature, have discovered that the smell comes from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods and absorbed by the earth and rocks.  During a rain, the oil is released into the air along with a bacterial by-product to produce the distinctive smell.  Rain also absorbs ions and thus can smell of ozone in a thunderstorm. Lots of science for the wonderful fresh odor of rain. 0 0

Thanks for stopping by! Quince jelly was a staple in both of my grandmother’s homes.  I liked its taste, sort of like pear or apple, but only lately have learned about the fruit the jelly is made from.  A quince is a highly fragrant  fruit, depending on where it is grown and the species, with the odor supposedly reminiscent of (depending on where you read): pineapple, guava, apples, vanilla and/or flowers.  I can’t distinguish between those scents myself, but apparently ancient traders claimed that one ripe quince could perfume an entire caravan. The quince is a member of the apple and pear family  and was apparently first used as a flavoring in meat stews; it can be stewed slowly in a tangine with meat and dried fruits.  It traditionally been used to make preserves, and I discovered that the word marmalade is derived from the Portuguese word mamela, meaning quince. Gotta get myself some quince jelly, maybe at the Farmer’s Market in Raleigh this year. Or maybe try to make some myself. 0 0

I love the smell of onions cooking. It makes me feel homey and strangely peaceful, not sure why. Onions figure into almost all of my main dishes, and I miss them when they’re not there.  The best smell of onion is when our grass is being mowed. Our lawn is seeded with them, so along with the wonderful odor of fresh grass, there is always a whiff of onion.  These grass-bound wild onions (Allium) are perfectly edible, too. The leaves, flowers and stalk are all fine, and they can be used any time a store-bought onion is called for.  I pick them every summer for salads and, if you’ll pardon the pun, feel like I am performing an act that goes back to our roots! 0 0

I love peaches and had never eaten a nectarine until I was in my 30s.  A nectarine is basically just a fuzzless peach, the fuzzy skin governed by a single allele of their genome. Nectarines are slightly smaller and supposedly a little more aromatic than peaches, and I’m transported by the ripe smell of both.  Any way you look at it, if you like peaches, you’ll like nectarines. Peaches came from Persia (present day Iran) and from there migrated to Europe, and were brought to North America by Spanish explorers in the 16th century. Here is a recipe originally made with peaches but equally good with nectarines. SWEET AND SPICY NECTARINE (PEACH) SUNDAE (From the Magnolia Grill, a wonderful restaurant in Durham that closed this year)  4 servings 1 lb frozen sliced peaches, thawed (can used diced fresh peaches) 1/3 cup sugar 1 ½ tbsp prepared hot pepper jelly (I use quite a bit more, since it is not spicy with this amount) 1/8th tsp ground cinnamon 1/8th tsp cayenne pepper (I used hot pepper flakes) 8 pecan shortbread cookies, crumbled Breyer’s peach or vanilla ice cream ½ cup whipped cream Bring peaches, sugar, hot pepper jelly, cinnamon and cayenne pepper to a boil over medium heat in a 2 quart saucepan. Reduce heat to low and simmer, stirring frequently until peaches release their juices and are heated through. Cool to room temp. To serve, arrange 1 crumbled cookie into each serving dish, top with peach sauce, then ice cream. Sprinkle with remaining crumbled cookies and drizzle on more peach sauce. Garnish with whipped cream. 0 0

Thanks to everyone visiting my blog! Coming from New England, I have to have maple syrup around: it is one of life’s wondrous staples and I love its smell.  There are lots of imitations out there, Mrs. Butterworth’s for example, but nothing beats the real stuff. Maple syrup is made from the sap of the sugar maple, red maple or black maple trees, according to Wikipedia. I never knew there were so many species of maple. These trees store starch in their trunks and roots before winter and convert it to sugar (sap) in the spring.  The syrup is obtained by tapping the tree (boring a hole into the trunk) and hanging a bucket below the hole.  Heating the raw syrup evaporates much of its water content, leaving concentrated sweetness. Native Americans were the first to collect maple syrup and the practice was adopted by European settlers. Vermont is still the largest producer in the US, generating about 5.5% of the world’s supply. When I was little and we had a fresh snowfall, Mom gave us a bottle of maple syrup, which we poured on the snow, a quick dessert.  Today I’ll share a recipe for maple pumpkin pie that I found in a magazine a while back (apologies for not being able to cite it) and that makes my taste buds sing. MAPLE PUMPKIN PIE Serves 8 9 inch prepared deep dish pie crust in a pan 15 oz can pumpkin puree 1 cup grade B maple syrup 1 cup heavy cream 4 eggs 1 tsp cinnamon ½ tsp ground ginger ½ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp allspice Pinch salt   Heat oven to 350o. Place pie crust on cookie sheet.  Whisk together pumpkin puree, maple syrup, heavy cream, eggs, spices, and salt. Pour into prepared crust. Bake 50-60 min, until center is just set. Set on rack to cool completely. 0 0

The lovely smell of linden tree blossoms in the spring takes me back to Plymouth, where I grew up, and the old library where I spent so many happy hours reading.  The library, which has since been replaced with a big modern one, was an imposing two story block building with columns on a narrow street lined with old, old houses.  It was set back from the street and had four linden trees in front, two on either side of the walk leading to the heavy double doors. The library was a regular stop every Saturday morning for the whole family, and the children’s books were in the basement.  The basement room was cozy and had old diamond-paned windows through which came wobbling light, and it was a splendid place to spend a rainy morning reading books in one of the outsized (to me) comfortable chairs.  This is where I found the Narnia series which so enchanted me that I bought the whole series in hardback when I was a graduate student, for the children that would be 12 more years in the coming! Linden trees have such a strong tug on my memory and my heart that we recently planted one at our lake house. 0 0

Not many people would immediately associate kerosene with the letter K. But the 100+ year old house I lived in while growing up in Plymouth had a kerosene stove in the kitchen. My mother kept it fired up for slow cooking. The supply of kerosene for the stove was found in a large cylindrical container with a cap and spout that fit on the back of the stove, and it was my job to take the container down to the basement and fill it from a large drum we kept near the outside entrance. There were two rather nasty problems with this job, about which I complained heartily to no avail. The first is that I always got kerosene on my hands, and the smell of kerosene is not particularly pleasant. The second is that I had to go down into the basement. The basement of the house was deep, large and early on contained one of those huge octopus furnaces and delivered warm air through grates on all three floors.  Spooky. The good thing about the kerosene is the wonderful dishes my Mom would cook on the stove all day – beef stew, spaghetti sauce, chop suey, pea soup, boiled beef – the odors of those meals permeated the house and more than made up for the smell of kerosene I couldn’t quite wash off my hands for a day or two. 0 0

This is a short, very sweet memory for me. When my husband and I moved to California in 70’s, the apartment we had rented in Newport Beach wasn’t going to be available until the end of August. So we moved into the spare bedroom of some friends from the lab where we would be working.  We had come from Cleveland, so every day in southern California was like a vacation: sunshine, warmth, the lure of the beach.  It took us several months to get settled in mentally! Outside our bedroom window was a night blooming jasmine, and every night when we went to bed, we inhaled the wonderful, almost overpowering scent of that flower.  Did you know that this jasmine is a member of the potato family? Whenever I smell jasmine, it takes me back all those years to the wonder of being in California for the first time. 0 0

With all the antibiotics, soothing balms and even treated Band Aids available to treat and disinfect kids’ cuts, there’s clearly a generational gap in the use (and smell) of iodine.  When I was in my tomboy stage, which only lasted 10 years, there wasn’t much I didn’t do that was bound to give me cuts and bruises: climbing tall trees, running through the woods behind our house, exploring a collapsing 150 year old hotel, riding my bike at breakneck speed, and playing all sorts of sports: field hockey, basketball, softball, ice hockey, swimming and tennis, plus reckless games of corner tag and some version of hill dill in the local pool.  Good god, where did I get that energy? I could use it now… Most of the time I ignored the cuts, but occasionally my mother would catch me in passing, grab the iodine, swab the cut with soapy water and apply that element liberally to the affected area.  Memories linger. Whenever I smell iodine, I cringe, because it was always accompanied by a brilliant burning sensation that was worse than the cut. 0 0