The food lab better home cooking through science ( PDFDrive ) 197

MY WIFE HATES THE FACT THAT OUR APARTMENT ALWAYS SMELLS LIKE FOOD... She treats the glorious scents of sizzling burgers and roasting chickens like enemy combatants, using guerilla tactic

MY WIFE HATES

THE FACT

THAT OUR APARTMENT ALWAYS

SMELLS LIKE

FOOD.

She treats the glorious scents of sizzling burgers and roasting chickens like enemy combatants, using guerilla tactics to hide jars of potpourri in places I’ll never look— among the Russian literature, perhaps, or strategically disguised as one of the vacation souvenir knickknacks above her desk As soon as I start a project in the kitchen, I wait the familiar swisssssh-clop of the window in the living room sliding open and the click-whir of the fan switching

on, in her desperate attempts to preemptively ventilate

That’s why rainy days are my favorite You can’t open the windows during a thunderstorm, which ensures that the awesome aroma wafting from my giant pot of chili slowly simmering away on the stovetop saturates the curtains and carpets And it’s there to greet you every time you enter the apartment for at least a few weeks It lives on in the bedsheets, ready to lull you to sleep like a warm glass of milk It lingers on the shower curtain, greeting you every morning with its meaty, oniony aroma when you brush your teeth My wife says I’m passive-aggressive I tell her she’s paranoid as I smile and heat up another bowl of chili

This chapter is all about those wonderful, apartment-saturating, aromatic stews, soups, and braises—the kind of

food so good that you check the weather report just hoping

for a hurricane warning And it all starts with stock