What’s That Smell?

Followers of the ol’ Save Your Fork journal will remember that I recently discovered I can eat small quantities of cheese again after suffering from dairy allergies for years. This has led to more and more experimentation in terms of trying new cheeses. We always come home with the favourites; the Mimolette, the Brie de Meaux; but we’ve also started trying new stuff. During a recent trip to St. Lawrence Market, we stumbled upon a whole display of artisinal Canadian cheeses, mostly from Quebec, but also from New Brunswick and even Manitoba. The problem with the market though, is there are so many smells, it’s often hard to zero in one one. And the cheese was too cold, so you couldn’t really get a good nose on it.

After we got everything home, there were a few cheeses that were a little more “feety” than we had anticipated. Double-wrapping the stuff didn’t put a dent in the stink. Finally we broke down and put it all in a Tupperware container. And then, a few days later, when I could take no more, I sent off Greg to Beer Geek night with the smelliest of the lot.

Which is why I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why my kitchen stunk like something had died in there. I mean, I literally pulled out the fridge and stove, thinking some food had gotten under there, or maybe a mouse, even though mice in a concrete apartment building seems improbable. I wrapped up the big bag of dogfood, thinking that was the source. I scrubbed down the cupboard where the garbage resides, I took apart the burners of the stove.

Nothing.

Then we figured out that the stink seemed to occur in conjunction with the fridge door being opened, even thought the inside of the fridge itself didn’t smell bad. I pulled everything out, looking for some blue furry dead hunk of zucchini, or some slimy green onions. And then I opened the cheese container.

Nothing was bad. Much of what was there was still in the original wrapping. It was just really, really stinky cheese. Really, really stinky. And this wasn’t even the stuff we considered to be feety when we brought it home!

So now we’ve got to eat the damn stuff so our kitchen will stop smelling like a Chinatown durianfruit display on a hot summer afternoon.