Tuesday, April 22, 2008

All I can say is: ramps stink.

When we last met, I'd just purchased a bunch of fresh ramps (pictured below) and was rhapsodizing about the joys of rampy spring goodness. As you can see from the photo, the ramps had undoubtedly just come out of the ground, and they took forever to clean...so, they went into a bucket of water in the fridge for a few days until I could figure out what to do with them.

Well, yesterday I decided I'd chop them up and freeze them in anticipation of a visit from my parents next weekend (my mom was sad to have missed the ramp festivals, so I figured we'd experiment with some ramp cookery when she came down instead).

Everything I'd read about ramps warned of their stinkiness, but wow...I wasn't quite prepared. What's really odd is that they don't seem smelly at all initially--it's not like chopping onions, where you get that eye-watering blast of sulfur. They seem a lot like mild-mannered scallions, until...some gas escapes them and coalesces in the atmosphere after the fact, the molecules attracted to each other in some inextricable way.

And mind you, this was after making vegetable curry for dinner, so the ramps had a lot of competition for airspace. I tried opening windows, burning some Body Shop satsuma oil (which only resulted in an appalling ramp/orange combo)--nothing worked. And the odor seemed to take on a nearly physical form and migrate through the house; I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and walked out in the hallway upstairs and there it was, like an olfactory poltergeist.

I'll cook these babies when my mom comes, but outside on the side burner of the gas grill (with apologies to the neighbors).

1 comment:

moneytastesbad said...

An olfactory poltergeist!!!

Thats the funniest thing I have heard all day.