The Scent of Melons

I have often wondered why there aren't more positive words for smells. There are lots of unpleasant words - stench, stink, mephitic, acrid, putrid - a few neutral or context-specific - pungent, earthy, sharp - and a handful of not very specific pleasant ones, such as aromatic and fragrant.
This is in spite of the power of smell to make us happy, to trigger memories, to influence us. People trying to sell or rent their houses are told to have a pot of coffee on the stove to make prospective buyers like the place more. Supermarkets are said to pump artificial fresh-bread-smell out to make shoppers feel hungry and make the place more appealing.
One sniff of fresh blackcurrant cordial and I'm back in my grandmother's kitchen, while the smell of hay transports me back to my childhood, hot and happy summer days bringing in the hay.
And walking past the fruit and veg section of our local Turkish shop the other day, I was seized by a scent of the most extraordinary beauty. It was a ripe Galia melon, which I bought and took home to put where I usually put a vase of flowers, and it filled the room with its sweet, soft, cool smell.

How does your garden grow?

The Kitchen Accomplice is very firmly a London girl, but even she enjoyed the freedom of my uncle's vegetable garden in Ireland.
We were staying with my cousins, who live in the comfortable half of the house, but with full access to the garden. There we dug potatoes and horseradish, pulled carrots and beets, collected cauliflower and cabbage, even courgettes.
In the greenhouse, we found perfectly ripe white peaches - one each - and some slightly less ripe ones that we peeled and puréed for Bellinis. Rich orange apricots and three final sweet raspberries added to our horde.

Granny Cooked

When my cousin Thomas was small, our mutual grandmother was concerned he was eating too much junk food. As a moral lesson, she trained her Pekinese dogs to do a new trick. You put a piece of food (they particularly liked bits of Victoria sponge) in front of them and said 'Junk food'. They would sneer. 'Crisps' - the same reaction. 'Burgers', 'chicken nuggets', 'chips' or 'biscuits' would all be scorned by Bangs or Azalea.
Then before the poor beast starved to death in front of your eyes, you would say 'Granny Cooked!' and the dog would gobble up the finally licit morsel.
I'm not sure Thomas really took this to heart as a lesson (although he is now a very devoted organic gardener and disciple of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall), but I was much impressed.
Granny Cooked notwithstanding, there are certain convenience foods I still find irresistable.
Hash browns, curly fries, waffles - there's a processed potato theme here, I realise.
I have started stocking hash browns in the freezer for the Kitchen Accomplice when she gets in from school.
This week i also invested in Toastabags, thinking they would be good for preparing hash browns.
But when I asked how it had gone, the young lady said cooking them from frozen was quite demanding.
"The toaster had to be popped like 1200 hundred times just to defrost them. So then I put them in the microwave. And then I fried them." By then, I guess, she was certain they were dead, so she ate them.