Smells Like Home

One of our neighbors came into our house one day several years ago. She stopped and turned her head side to side nostrils flaring as she sniffed this way and that. I’m sure I blushed thinking that she smelled the results of one of our bad puppies or some such unfortunate odor.

Instead, she said “Your house never smells like anything. Normally, you smell a little onion from last night’s dinner or something, but your house never has any smell. It doesn’t smell like anyone lives here.”

After my first sense of relief, I spent some time thinking about that. I had set up an ionizer air purifier (remember the bad puppy) and obviously it was working. But, in my quest to rid our house of bad odor, I had also gotten rid of the rich wonderful aromas that makes a house a home.

I think of this when I notice the fragrance of the hand soap from the bathroom or Paula’s perfume and yes the lingering aromatic memory of last night’s dinner. These are the olfactory signals that our house is a home. Even the intermingling odor of the unwashed pet or burnt food adds to the sense of home. If you take that away, you take away part of what makes us real. Our lives are all a mixture of sweet and pungent, and if you take away part of what makes us essentially human, you do an injustice to what is left.

I was never more reminded of this than this past weekend. I spent most of Saturday making homemade chicken stock for the upcoming holidays and trying my hand at making apple butter for the first time. First, I channeled my inner Ina Garten meets Anne Burrelle and went shopping for my ingredients.

I picked out 3 of the plumpest whole chickens I could find. Then going down the produce aisle, I selected a few bundles of fresh herbs, parsley, sage and thyme. The carrots, celery and onions came next along with a few lemons (thank you Anne), cinnamon sticks and garlic. While I was getting the stock ingredients, Paula was collecting some Fuji, Granny Smith and Honeycrisp apples for the butter. We met at the register and my “feelgood” feeling for this cooking project was already in full swing.

Saturday morning found me wide awake early anticipating the day’s culinary adventure. I put my brand new stainless steel 20 quart stock pot on top of the stove and began adding ingredients. The 3 chickens went in first, followed by a palm full of salt, about that much black peppercorns and a small handful of red peppercorns. Then I added the fresh herbs, a spoonful of red pepper flakes, a few spoonfuls of dried sage, and about 6 bay leaves. I rough chopped the carrots, celery, onions and cut the garlic bulbs and lemons in half. I grated a teaspoon or so of nutmeg and added 3 small cinnamon sticks to the pot finishing with 8 quarts of water. I brought all that up to a boil then set it to simmer away for about 5 hours.

After getting everything in the pot, I decided it was time for a coffee break. As I sipped my coffee, I set my mind toward the apple butter. Memories of my parents putting up cases of apple butter every fall conjured up visions of them using a colander to get just the right consistency. That just seems too much work to me.

I read several recipes and settled on a crockpot recipe I found on The Homestead and Survival Facebook site with a few changes. I like the idea of keeping the skins on and using the food processor to get the “butter” texture. I took away most of the sugar and added allspice with wonderful results.

I started with coring and rough chopping a total of 18 apples. This filled my Ninja Cooker almost to overflow, but I knew they would cook down. I added about a ½ cup of water, ½ cup of brown sugar, 2 heaping tablespoons of ground cinnamon, and 1 tablespoon of Jamaican allspice. That was it, so simple. Now everything was cooking and cooking and cooking.

I vacuumed the floor, straightened the living room, made more coffee. Then I sat down with my kindle. I had such a sense of wellbeing. By this time the house was smelling amazing. The chicken stock wafting a savory undertone punctuated by the sweet spicy notes of the apple butter carried me along on a domestic fantasy magic carpet ride. This is what home smells like.