foodie day

Aromas can really activate things. Right now I am smelling fennel , onions, carrots, garlic roasting slowly with pork for my supper. Easy enough to do and so good. Only drawback is smelling the aroma as it cooks as my appetite build with each passing moment.Fennel ( anise in some markets) is underused around this area in my mind. Yep, it has a licorice taste when raw but it is soft ends and becomes nutty when cooked. Like parsnips in it s all in the preparations.

Endive is not used much either but sliced into a salad ( and you can do this with fennel also) or cooked with ham and cheese it is a real wow factor. Roses, nasturtiums and geraniums can all be used in salads, and squash blossoms can be stuffed or deep fried. At first these unusual for a midwestern USA palate were a bit odd, but cooking shows and reading got to me and I tried them. Amazing what we can learn when we let go of old in the rut ideas and venture out of our comfort zone.

Foods are such a memory spur. Molasses cookies in the often will bring my grandmother into the room. I can see her mixing them in her Ohio kitchen and the blue roaster she stored them in as if they were here with me. roast beef and Yorkshire pudding( bit as mom called it) brings my mother back to me in all her spitfire glory. Such memories tied with food---Warm out of the oven home made bread with butter and sugar melting on it( Grandma James), tea and custard( grandma Shubert), old black witch quick bread( my girls growing up). Every time I pull out a family recipe the memories of the cooks before me join me as I cook and enrich the product with their remembered love.

Another spur in the aroma class comes from the males in my life. Old Spice and my Dad is there with his huge protective cloak around me. Pipe tobacco brings back Grandpa Shubert though his shade is fleeting as he died when I was very young, but Uncle Jim Lynn joins him and lends his quiet self to the memories.Pine tar (now that is odd but true) brings back my Aunt Anna Mae who used that shampoo occasionally and it is more a male scent than a female one.

For me at least aromas make the memory vault open easily. Music, words, places they work too but aromas are the strongest of all of these spurs. Which ones work for you?