Along the lines of “the grass is always greener” must be something about cooking. If you have to, you don’t want to and if you can’t, you obsess over what you could be concocting. Recently the Accidental Locavore has been in the middle of selling the city apartment. One of the sales tips we were given was not to cook fish or Indian food during the sales process. So I dutifully moved all the Indian spices to the country (out of sight, out of mind) and bypassed the fish counter at Whole Foods. But the joke was on me, because what did I end up eating (out) all week? Indian food and fish!
And, as odoriferous as Indian food and fish are, there are other offenders not on my brokers’ list. Top stinky food for me has to be grilled or seared salmon. Yeah, ok, it’s fish, but it falls into its own special category. As much as I like the taste of salmon, if I’m cooking it at home, it’s baked, steamed or wrapped in parchment.
Next up, that classic — Thanksgiving turkey. Send me hate mail but I hate the smell of turkey! It penetrates everything, everywhere. Nothing worse than jumping out of the shower, grabbing a towel and being engulfed in the smell of roasted holiday dinner gone by! Not my idea of aromatherapy.
My third too-stinky-to-cook candidate? Fried food. Like turkey, the smell of fried food lives on long after the dish is but a memory. Not to mention, the fact that you have to deal with storing all the oil, before and after. Supposedly if you use a fryer, the smell isn’t an issue, but then you have to have a place for the fryer, right?
And finally, the one really wonderful stinky thing (that my broker would have warned me about had she known me better)? Stinky cheese! What puts stinky cheese in a different category for me is that to get rid of the smell, all you have to do is eat it. No cheese, no smell. So, please pass the Áˆpoisses (check out this great description from Murray’s) and let me know in the comments what pungent foods you avoid.
The logic of Aristotle would acknowledge the truth of the song” Love stinks” And also that we love food (loco about it even), therefore food stinks, but we love it in spite of ourselves. Eat the cheese, smoke the bird and keep the salmon in the sushi.sadly, one must remember that there a fine line between “aroma” and”stink”, as may be attested to by sampling men’s colognes. Some make men stink like fish, but nearly all of them are worn by turkeys, and the worst of them are really cheesy.
HUGE thanks for the cheese advice — eat it!
I like cooking smells 🙂 I like fried food, salmon, turkey. But simple solution to cooking turkey smells: just sous vide it. That’s the one thing I hate about sous vide, you can’t smell it 🙁