Skip to main content

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

Comments

Sassy Sundry said…
Those are all divine smells. I'll add roasted veggies with rosemary, garlic, and salt. Mmm...
7:48 AM
Gina said…
Garlic!

And banana bread.
11:41 AM
dive said…
I can't answer this one Robyn.
Being anosmic sucks.
4:11 PM
Scout said…
Dive, I was hoping you could do it from memory.
5:15 PM
dive said…
Hee hee. That's the only way I'll ever do it I'm afraid, Robyn …
Sigh …
Oh, you mean smell?
6:53 AM
Terroni said…
New babies after their first bath. My favorite smell.

(Oh, maybe I should clarify, I'm not suggesting that we should cook them. Let the record show that I am against cooking them.)
10:45 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No More Mr. Nice Guy

It's good to be a nice person--to say nice things, to do nice things, to write nice things--but I declare an end to the use of the word nice. Nice is what you say when you can't think of any other adjective. Someone shows you a picture of their back yard--that's nice. Someone tells you about their afternoon adventure--that's nice. Or someone describes their childhood in great detail and sometimes with painstaking effort--that's nice. It's a lazy word, and it's non-descriptive. Nice is like mashed potatoes with noodles and chicken gravy all in a big pile on one plate with some canned corn for garnish. Everything is the same color and texture and base substance--starch (this is a favorite Amish dish). Nice is like a partly cloudy day in April when outside feels like inside, and you can't tell a difference between the lighting and the temperature of your living room and the lighting and temperature of your front yard. Nice is a glass of lukewarm water. ...
20 comments
Read more

My Sitemeter is All Bloated and Not Quite Itself

I'm tempted to let it sit on the couch with its feet curled up under a blanket, a hot cup of coffee in hand, a block of cherry almond bark Chocolove within reach, and An Affair to Remember spinning in the DVD player. I'm one of those obsessive bloggers, the kind who checks her sitemeter as often as possible throughout the day, the kind who gauges the quality of her writing by the number of readers who regularly stop by. I've become less interested in the overall number of hits and more interested in the number of repeat hits. The return visitors are the ones I long for. When my sitemeter reads forty at the end of the day, and the majority of those hits are webpals who have conversed, I'm happy. Forty may seem low to many of you, but I've only been at this since August. To me, forty is a jackpot. A few days ago, I sat down at my laptop and discovered a number somewhere in the eighties. Eighties! Yippee! Yeeha ! Hoo-rah ! I've been discovered by the webworld , o...
18 comments
Read more

Long Live Anita Bowser

You know I occasionally check my hometown newspaper's website to scan the obituaries (morbid, I know, but I'm at that age). Over this past weekend, I read the obituary of Indiana State Senator Anita Bowser . She was a noted Democrat who championed causes protecting the neediest in the state's population. She was respected on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence and plain and outspoken approach to law making. The picture on her senate page is lovely. I remember none of those things about Anita Bowser . My first year or so in college was spent at a branch of Purdue University, and in the early 80s, Anita was a political science professor. She taught my American Government class my freshman year, and she was a mess. Somewhere in my old text book, I have a sketch of her drawn on a particularly dull day in class--her hose sagged at her ankles, her slip showed at least half an inch all the way around, her hair had been slept on but not brushed, and her bright red lip stic...
18 comments
Read more