Made Indian food—house and clothes smell like curry now

[Anonymous]

OP, get a large glass food grade spray bottle (from Amazon, of course), and fill it with Vodka. Spray the air and clothes with Vodka and the smell will disappear. If it is very strong smell and has grease vapors mixed in it, you make need to spray a few times, but it basically removes all smell from clothes and air.

[Anonymous]

When I was 8 years old we moved into a house that was previously owned by a family of south Asian descent - I never met them but I know that now because the house had a very strong odor of what I know now was typical spice profile of Indian or Pakistani food. We were boring WASPs who barely used salt and pepper on food, maybe the occasional bay leaf. My mother repainted the whole house which pretty much eliminated the odor.

Fast forward 40+ years and I am a halfway decent cook of butter chicken and a few other types of curry dishes, and have to force myself not to make curry every single week. It is up there on the list of foods I would eat on repeat on a desert island if I had to choose only one kind curry would likely be it. The fragrances and flavors are sublime. I go through Indian spices on a regular basis so luckily I have some good sources for high quality low cost spices.

I’m always happy when I walk in my house the day after I’ve made a curry and smell the lingering fragrance. My air filter units (BlueAir, highly recommend the brand) does a great job eliminating after a day or so but I wouldn’t mind if it didn’t. The predominant odor is garlic (I use it in copious amounts) but also the array of colorful spices that stain your clothes if you aren’t careful. I’m happy enough with the stains, too.

I grew up in a family that included too many bigots and I heard endless comments about garlic eaters and curry eaters growing up. My father even excoriated the Portuguese community I grew up around for the flavors in their foods - in retrospect I think my German father and English mother were probably just jealous of people who knew how to cook with flavor. I hardly ever cook the foods I grew up with, some of the dishes were downright disgusting and others I previously liked I have found much less appealing with the maturing of my palate. This weekend I cooked corned beef cabbage and potatoes, using a brisket I had corned myself for the first time. It was a lovely flavor profile compared to the pre corned briskets I’ve purchased in the past, but it’s still a fatty hunk of meat and veggies also end up fatty as they simmer in the same juices. I’m eating leftovers of this dish for the next two nights and can’t wait until my day of Wednesday when I will make my very spicy variation on butter chicken that I have perfected over the last couple of years. And I can’t wait for my home to smell like Indian spices again!

[Anonymous]

Y'all. Can you give good solutions for removing the smell of cooking? It is actually a big problem because the way the houses are constructed here. I have to go through all the steps to make the house smell proof before I cook.

Eating boiled peas is not the solution, guys! Meh foods makes people unhappy. This is a nation of gun owners. We want happy people in this country who eat good food. So lets think of ways to minimize smells without sacrificing taste and joy of cooking.

[Anonymous]

Use an air filter in your home - it helps to clean the air of all kinds of things including cooking smells. BlueAir is a great brand.

Open windows if weather permits while cooking. Use the ventilation system over your stovetop - of limited value in some homes as many are vented to the space between walls at best and sometimes to no place.

Burn a scented candle whose scent you like better than the smell of the food you’re cooking. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, since taste is heavily composed of the body’s smelling capacity - people without a sense of smell cannot taste much either. So why would you like the flavor in your mouth of food you can’t stand the smell of?

Best solution, learn to love the smell of flavorful food and live with it sticking around for a few hours or even days. What is the appeal of an antiseptic environment, anyway?

[Anonymous]

Open windows (yes, even in the cold)
Get an air filter as recommended above
Use the vinegar spray as recommended above
Bathe in a bunch of Tide
Stop being so fragile— it’s just delicious cooking smells!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, get a large glass food grade spray bottle (from Amazon, of course), and fill it with Vodka. Spray the air and clothes with Vodka and the smell will disappear. If it is very strong smell and has grease vapors mixed in it, you make need to spray a few times, but it basically removes all smell from clothes and air.

Did your mother teach you this "trick," and was your mother Lucille Bluth?