Smelly

I work with a creative person who has loaned me a creative book--Caffeine for the Creative Mind by Stefan Mumaw and Wendy Lee Oldfield. This book is filled with exercises to encourage creative thinking. It suggests things as odd as designing a protective helmet for a lady having tea or drawing a house using only dissected circles to simpler tasks like writing a haiku about your boss or coming up with the perfect vanity license plate for a nun.

One of the assignments related to smell explains that the average human being can recognize 10,000 different odors and can recall them with a 65% accuracy rate after an entire year, far more accurate than our ability to remember sights. The task is to list twenty things that smell great when they are cooking, based on memory. Here is my list:

1. Fried chicken
2. Fried okra
3. Corn bread
4. Strawberry jam
5. Onions
6. Roast turkey
7. Sage stuffing
8. Apple butter
9. Roast duck
10. Steak on the grill
11. Ribs on the grill
12. Sauteed shrimp
13. Chocolate chip cookies
14. Cranberry chutney
15. Wheat bread
16. Chicken soup
17. Lamb stew with marjoram
18. Chocolate souffle
19. Stuffed pizza
20. Mulled cider