Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Cooking with Eve

I've been teaching my daughter Eve to cook. She's been out of school for her summer break for about two weeks now, going on three. We started with apricot pie utilizing grandmas fresh fruit from her tree. While we were looking for that recipe we came across a pumpkin lasagne recipe that looked delicious. Thus we picked up fresh lasagne noodles from our pal Giuseppe over at Cafe Carolina and got to work. Following in the orange color theme, she made a delicious orange juice salad dressing that has come in handy just about everyday. Broccoli quiche and french fries, actually the french fries have been made a few times, they're pretty yummy. Yesterday was traditional potato salad and today stuffed portobello mushrooms with feta cheese and walnuts.

Whats next? Well, I'm working on a large supply of the vanilla room spray that Greg adores and contemplating wood notes for Chaparral. Eve has her heart set on crumpets with clotted cream. That will go nicely with a cup of black tea.

The supermarket is a great place to test out your sniffer skills and pick out different notes. How many floral notes do you sense in the fresh flower section? What about all the fruity and vegetative smells in the fresh produce area? Fish, meat, soap, bread, chocolate...see, lots of opportunities to enhance your note identification skills. How vast is your vocabulary of scent? As perfumers, we do this constantly...obsessively actually. It's similar to how visual artists perceive color, shapes, patterns, etc. Deeper awarenesses into everyday life.

2 comments:

AromaX said...

Sounds delicious and inspiring, Roxana.

Can I hire you as loving mom style cooking teacher ;-)? I enjoy your conscious approach, connection with nature and sense of quality by cooking.

Thanks for the lesson - you did remind me of conscious smelling - not only smell and like/dislike, but try to understand what do I smell and what strings it touches...

Illuminated Perfume said...

Sure I'll teach you, although, I'd suggest learning with my mother, she is the master chef...who learned from her Italian grandmother out on the ranch in Argentina.

Conscious smelling, exactly...without categorizing into positive or negative....and taking it a step further as to how it makes us feel and why. All this helps to bring us into the moment. Thank you for deepening what I wrote even further AromaX!