The Smell is Getting to Me

I think I can speak for all mothers in our area when I say I am looking forward to kids going back to school tomorrow. Not that I have little or even multiple children who have been at home wanting to be entertained; and not that I lost my power and needed to keep small people warm and un-electronically entertained or fed; and not that we have missed even a third as many days as our friends in places like Boston where “winter camping” became the inside norm.

No, but my child and her Spanish classmate took over my kitchen today to make food for a class presentation tomorrow, which involved using a large bottle of vegetable oil and frying up plantains, chicken and making guacamole. The house smells like we are running a French fry stand or other frying empire.

I did my best to stay out of the kitchen because I don’t think I could bear to swim through the tiny oil droplets flying through the air and landing on every surface in the kitchen. On the other hand, I appreciate my child learning to cook with her friend. I did not get one question about how to do anything. They studied the techniques and executed them without instruction from me. Proof is their need to use a whole bottle of oil. I am sure the outcome is more authentic than my lightened up version would have been.

Now my issue is I am going to have to spend some of my childfree day tomorrow riding the house of the smell or I am going to open a funnel cake stand in my kitchen and capitalize on the already stinky space.

It is amazing to me how sensitive my nose is to fried food now. Just the whiff of overly hot oil makes my stomach turn. I guess that I have actually broken myself of ever wanting to eat fried food again. Now I need some olfactory overload of baked goods so I can gross my brain out on the smell of the things I really crave.

I wonder if Carter could get class credit for making 10,000 chocolate chip cookies? I am guessing that is about the number I might need to be baked in my kitchen to make me sick of the smell. Now that I think about it that number is probably low by a factor of 10. 100,000 cookies, that might make me never want to taste one again. I don’t know, that number might be low by a factor of 100…