Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

omg our landlords are this crazy old couple and i don't know what it is that they cook but the smells from their dinners every night...blech! it's seriously triggered my gag reflex a few times. same thing with the chipotle on sixth avenue in the village...i've never been inside but it releases a smell onto the street that's absolutely poisonous.

i hate the smell of most foods when i'm not eating them, but when i am, then they're delicious!

I'm used to seeing, hearing and smelling new, interesting, and sometimes unpleasant things when I visit my friend on his farm.

Once I was sitting with him in his kitchen, and something in a pot on the stove was giving off an awful stench. When his wife came in I asked what she was cooking.

It was raw wool being boiled to make felt!

@PM: "I'll bet you were glad to discover it was something you wouldn't have to eat"

Another time I was sitting at their kitchen table having coffee and playing with an odd looking hand tool, which turned out to be a pair of castration pliers!

I asked my friend why in the world they were kept in the kitchen, and he replied, "Better than having them laying around in the bedroom."

The smell in my grandmother's house was indescribable. It was a mixture of rancid grease, overcooked foods (chicken, green beans, fat back, etc), and ash (from a wood cook-stove she insisted on using, even though she had an elecric one). She was also in the habit of not covering food in the refrigerator. The smell was horrendous. Needless to say, I did not eat anything that came from that kitchen. The thought of that smell still turns my stomach.

@SB.......I knew those shears reminded me of something and it finally came to me.........my pruning shears for tree branches. Just different sizes. Of course a chain saw would.........oh, never mind.

I'm afraid there are quite a few, so here goes:

*fish being cooked (probably, among the worst offenders as far as I'm concerned. Incidentally, I do not eat cooked fish);

*fresh bananas (yet, if I overcome this one long enough, I don't mind bananas in banana nut bread - but the flavour is significantly subtler there, and the texture of bananas is, well, gone);

*overcooked stinky cabbage. I also never cook cabbage for more than a few minutes, Perky. When I first made a vegetable soup with cabbage for my mother-in-law, she was surprised that a) it didn't take me 3 hours to cook it, and b) she could actually taste the vegetables. Now, my mother-in-law is one of those people who eats barely enough to not pass out for fear that she may gain an ounce. But if she comes over and I have this particular soup, she'll always have a bowl.

*cheap balsamic vinegar being reduced - while the end result is syrupy and spectacular, you don't want to plan a visit to a friend round the time she engages in this particular endeavour, trust me on this one!

*beets

*papaya

*ripe cantaloupe

I can't be convinced to take a bite of any of the last three items for the life of me, the smell is way too off putting!

Oh, and microwaved popcorn -- smells absolutely sickening to me, which is probably why I pop my corn in the cast iron pot. OK, I'm done now:-)

I can't think of any edible food that disgusts me, but rancid oil and spoiled milk products would top the list of things I don't want to smell when I'm going to someone's house.

in better times the smell of canned tuna hit my gag reflex everytime. these days just about everything hits that button, especially meats of anykind, in any state from raw to burned and everything in between. but even raw veggies have set me off.

@PerkyMac - I live in a small studio apartment and I have to have every fan in the place running when I fry fish.

Definitely fish. I've always hated fish but when I was younger my parents cooked it a lot - and every other night in the summer at our summer house. BLECH.

Also I LOVE brussels sprout, but have to keep a window wide open and a fan going whenever I cook them. The other night it was too cold to open the window for long when I made them, and I literally almost got sick, I had to leave my apartment!

oh no guys, i think i've smelled the one of the worst things in the world cooking and that is "chitlins", i don't even know if i spelled it right. i was 10 and i went into a carry out in washington d.c. and they had them boiling on a stove. right back out the door i remember going with my parents. AWFUL, AWFUL SMELL!!!!!

@Cassaendra, here's another vote for coffee tha's been sitting on the burner all day. Yuck! I also hate the smell of those fakey-fakey flavored coffees. It just permeates everything.

I hate the way the house smells the day after frying food. That smell clings pretty bad, too. Usually only happens once a year, after making latkes. But if we could arrange for Hanukkah to be in a warmer month so I could open all the windows, I'd be ok with that.

The last one that really, really drives me nuts is when people light heavily scented candles to cover their cooking smells. I would really rather smell the food. And I'm not totally sure here, but it might be a sin to try to cover the smell of homemade tomato sauce and lasagna baking with "honeydew mango mist."

I'm just sayin'

@bessfour......do you buy a new freezer when that one is full? Sorry, couldn't resist. I have once a week pick-up and in the summer, it can get nasty to open the can to add another bag.

If you don't use your dishwasher, that might also be a great hiding place for valuables. I'll bet most thiefs would look in the freezer first and get a huge shock!

@PerkyMac - I fry them. I think the combination of the sprouts and the frying is what does it - even though they're delicious (a little olive oil, salt and pepper, and afterwards some grated romano cheese, MMM!) Sigh, I guess that's the price we pay.

thanks Perky but NO Not preggers Thank God! chemo tends to make your sense of smell more pronounced so I still manage to eat and I'm thankful everyday I wake up with a stuffy nose ;)

@huney........that was my fear. Hope you don't have too many treatments left. I had already started to pray that you'd be healed. We're here for you!

@huney.... I'm terribly sorry. Treatment can be a bitch. A friend's father had the same reaction when he when thru chemo. It lightened way up when the treatment stopped.

@huney-our thoughts are with you! Hope the chemo helps heal you real quick- too bad it has to suck so much in the process!

@huney - praying for your full and speedy recovery. And hope that you have a stuffy nose till the end of your treatment:-).

I'm with the microwave popcorn group too...what an awful smell.
I also don't like the smell of boiled cabbage....too many memories of bland ham & cabbage dinners growing up!
huney....keep your chin up....good luck through the rest of your treatment!

Occasionally on a Sunday morning I will make lox, eggs & onions and stink up the house for the whole day. Or better yet, kippers & onions. My partner thinks it's all vile and disgusting but I love it...brings back memories of my grandmother.

@huney.......my daughter does the same thing, and I swear it's on purpose although she never admits it! p.s. she came out on the other side of what you're going through with flying colors. You have lots in common!

@RichardCrystal......are kippers the same as the canned kipper snacks? My mother and I loved them and ate them straight from the can or made sandwiches with them. We liked them packed in mustard - like sardines. Rest of the family ran for cover. Do you eat them with raw onions?

only ONE smell bothers me......hazelnut coffee........i have a really strong gag reflex but that'll do it every time...lol

i'm with you guys on these:

microwave popcorn. eeeew!

hazelnut flavored coffee. why, why, why????

okra. especially canned, which my father used to like to eat. blech.

once i spent christmas with some friends who were cooking chitlins. i don't pull out the jewish card very often, but i used it as excuse not to eat them... the smell was PUTRID!!!

OMG Perky I had the same thing happen with the tater, and you are SO right! I thought something died in the back of my pantry! It took scrubbing three times with bleach before I couldnt smell it anymore and then I think it was more the bleach fumes than anything else. I also have to agree with the coffee suggestion, any flavored coffee smells nasty to me, also I forgot the biggie, canned asparagus! My mom used to eat that mushy nasty stuff on toast, it always made me feel sick, and convinced me I hated asparagus at least until I tried the real stuff.

I have a new one, also a puzzle. A friend brought me a huge bag of lemons from Costco and I didn't have room in the fridge (he brought me a ton of produce), so I left them in the bag on the counter for 2 days. I could see the perfect lemons in front, but the plastic at the back was not see-through. Three lemons had turned to smelly green dust! Mystery smell solved. There was only one other that I had to cut off part of the rind, but I scrubbed all the rest, and put them in a bowl in the fridge. I hope they don't freeze - no room in the crisper.

I have a question for you. Would you zest lemons that had been exposed to that green dust? Should I spray them with a bleach solution and rinse? Should I trash them? What would you do?