Smells Delicious? Couldn't Care Less.

My last post was a while ago.  I'm doing much better, but in the meantime, I realized an annoying effect that the head trauma had.  I lost my sense of smell.  Apparently, it can take anywhere from 2 months to never to heal.  This put a damper on my cooking.

Taste had a severe impact, since I was only able to taste sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (or whatever they call it these days).  I can also feel the burn of peppers, but that's not so much of a taste as a feel.  You can test that out by putting it on sensitive skin... you'll feel it if you rub a pepper on your eyelids.  For several weeks, the foods I ate only had the tastes I mentioned, temperature, texture, and presentation.  I lost over 15 pounds during that time, not because I was on a diet, but because neither cooking nor eating was fun.

Fortunately, some smells are coming back.  This does not mean that I smell a weakened version of what everybody else smells, it just means that I can only smell certain compounds.  I can smell white vinegar, but I cannot smell smoke.  I can taste the difference between regular Pepsi and Pepsi Throwback (a limited time Pepsi made with cane sugar instead of corn syrup), but I can't really tell between Coke and Dr. Pepper.  Vanilla tastes different than vanillin (artificial flavoring for vanilla), but sugar cookies and oatmeal cookies taste the same.

Anyways, so I was making london broil today, but the smoke detector kept going off.  Actually, this smoke detector seems to go off everytime I've been cooking these days.  I checked the broil, but no burning.  I'm convinced that the smoke detector is defected.  The meat was rare, which was how it was supposed to be.  I'm thinking that I'll just cut costs for food and not spend too much on herbs and spices for the upcoming few weeks/months.  What do you think?