The cooking aromas that last forever.
It has finally dawned on me or rather the penny dropped, why stoves have that fancy bit of design over them. You know, those extractor fans. Those ugly looking hovercraft things often suspended mid-air above the stove. Who hasn't hit their head on the edge of one...?
In my last flat, it was merely a dust gatherer and wouldn't have worked even if I had switched it on. Somehow I never thought I needed it. Fast forward to now and it is a whole different sort of story. Bob was given a big lump of meat.
He came home from a drink or two with his friend and casually mentioned that he had been given this piece of meat. It was late enough already and I was ensconced on the couch avidly enthralled with some TV program. My response was a kind of general wave which was meant as a
" Hello & Oh that's nice dear ".
In the middle of the night while going to the bathroom ( where else does one go at that hour? ) I hit my toe on a packet standing in the middle of our entrance hall. Jeez-a-lou, what on earth? Bugger it, Bob had left the bag with the lump of meat right where he put it down when he came home....!
Luckily it was wrapped in plastic and felt still frozen to the touch. Fair enough, no need to put it in the fridge ( no space in any case ) because it was still icy. The next morning I told Bob that he would have to slow cook the piece of meat / roast as I had to go out.
Well, Bob cooked it perfectly but we both didn't realize that it was a smoked piece of meat. Oh, and as the headline says, we do not have an extractor fan. Oh my golly gosh, does our house smell of meat. It has been two days and that smell still hits you the second you come into the house. It is not even a nice smell and that makes me wonder whether this meat actually needed to be cooked? Maybe it was a new age ham?
This morning a friend came over to get a bit of help with an English paper. Bob and I cleaned and scrubbed for two hours beforehand trying to get the smell out. Since the cooking episode, we have had all windows open almost non-stop! Do you think that would help...of course not.
I had scrubbed the oven earlier and it looked clean & fresh and thought I might as well bake some cookies to get a biscuity smell permeating in our house. A sort of kitchen deodorant. Well, all we could smell was a cookie aroma mingled with that awful meat one. Great combination!! Percolating a pot of coffee kind of helped a little bit.
Of course the cherry on the cake was when I was sitting at the kitchen table with my friend and Bob walked in to make himself a cup of coffee. He opened the fridge and all of a sudden, a nauseating whiff of something wafted across. Spilled milk perhaps gone bad? Let me tell you, the meaty smell is far more preferable to the " off " milk one....
It was one of those moments where you hope that the other person didn't get a whiff of the offending smell, but that is like saying the Easter Bunny won't leave any chocolate eggs outside!
Biggi
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