Pleasant House

One of the reasons I love cooking so much is because the result often transports me to another happy time in my life. The taste of homemade raspberry ice cream reminds me of hot summer days picking and eating raspberries and coming home with blood-red hands and not a care. The sound of corn popping on the stove takes me back to Friday night movies on the couch with a big bowl of the buttery stuff.

Scent is, of course, another essential sense when it comes to enjoying cooking. I often hold a cluster of tomatoes up to my nose to be immediately transported to the middle of my mom’s garden when the tomato plants were so large they would swallow me up. If I catch a whiff of smoke coming from a chimney far away I think of a cold winter dusk when I’d be dragging my sled back from the field to the orange glow of the family hearth and a bowl of gooey French onion soup.

This week, while Chelsea took a detour on her way to work, she drove by our old apartment and spotted the old lilac tree in full bloom. I probably would have just driven by and reminisced about the three or four springs that we spent in that apartment savoring the intoxicating aroma of the lilac tree as it would blow through the dining room window. But that wasn’t enough for Chelsea. She had to OWN that scent. So, the next day she knocked on the old apartment door with a pair of scissors in a Trader Joe’s bag and met the acquaintance of the new tenants. They made small talk, and Chelsea asked if they would mind her snipping a few blossoms from the tree that seemed like it was part of our family for so long. Of course they didn’t mind and wished her a pleasant day.

When I got home from work there were several bunches of lilacs exploding out of vases throughout the apartment and their aroma reminded me of happy times. There is a culinary connection though. Chelsea learned that lilacs are indeed edible and set forth infusing them into spirits and has plans to candy them!