Another question from the Guardian’s The Q&A, the standard series of questions it asks celebs in its ongoing feature. (We talked about another question from the series last month.) This weekend for us:
What is your favorite smell?
Mine might be baking bread. Or cinnamon. Maybe coffee? Definitely a food smell. I have a two-track mind: if I’m not thinking about movies, I’m thinking about food.
You?
Image from cooking site Merci Mama, accompanying an awesome-sounding recipe for easy no-knead bread.
(If you have a suggestion for a Question, feel free to email me.)
Hot tarmac.
That’s like trying to choose a favorite child so there has to be more than one. Definitely with you on the bread/cinnamon/coffee smells; have to round that trifecta of yumminess off with vanilla. In nature, freshly-mown grass and the way the air smells right before/after it rains. And some floral scents: plumeria, pikake, tuberose, ginger, gardenia, and carnation. New books … Christmas trees … hmmm-mm-m ….
]
My girlfriend’s perfume.
There’s a particular loamy, sweet smell of a northern woods (North America) in mid-summer where there’s a mix of trees, clearings and some areas with sweet fern that I know I love, but I can’t know it right now. Smells are funny. We can’t remember them, but the second we smell them again, they make us remember other things.
I also like the smell of a well-kept horse barn. Hay, horse, oats, wood, …
For food, it depends on my mood; but, can’t really go wrong with the smell of garlic and ginger sauteeing.
I instantly thought of food, as I assumed everyone would. Then I went to the obvious one, bread, which you said as well. My wife bakes bread almost once a week, and it’s a great smell every time.
Chocolate Pudding cake in the oven smells amazing as well.
Being a gardener, I could list a million flowers, but I’ll go with good old Milkweed, which smells sweetly amazing, and Summersweet, which has a spicy sweet fragrance.
There’s so many more things, mostly related to gardening and the outdoors, I could list, but I’ll keep it at that.
Really good tea.