Oh, good!
Seriously? I don't completely succeed, but I try hard. I've got a powerful extractor fitted to the correct height over the cooker, and I use it on Low even when boiling water for pasta. It's turned to High for anything involving hot fat or roasting. If desperate I close open the kitchen window and outside door after shutting the kitchen internal door (and putting the cats' necessaries where they can reach them). I clean the extractor filters weekly, otherwise the cooker area smells of stale grease. Our house windows are old, leaky sashes. We've only got (removable) secondary glazing on the downstairs windows, so there's lots of fresh air movement in the upstairs rooms, plus our bedroom window is always open an inch or two. We don't put the heat on in most of the upstairs (including the bedrooms), and the thermostat is usually set on 16, so there is relatively little heat lost. My 'office' is heated by the waste heat from the monitor, printer and computers :-) We've got no fitted carpets to hold smells, just bare floorboards and rugs. After vacuuming I turn the rugs over and sprinkle a few drops of lavender oil on the underside, partly because I love the smell and partly in hope that it will discourage mothes and (heaven forfend our indoor cats acquire them again) fleas. I have a couple of those aromatherapy things for heating oil, and I use them: lavender in summer-upstairs, a mix of cinnamon, clove, orange and sandalwood downstairs in the winter, about once a fortnight or so. I actually burn sandalwood incense occasionally... shades of the 60s :-) and I've got proper pomanders of oranges solidly covered with cloves sitting on the mantleshelves downstairs. The oldest ones live on top of the little woodburner, and gave off a nice smell of hot clove-orange muted by age. The cats leave a lot of hair around, and it turns to adhesive felt incredibly quickly. The best way to get it off fabric is to rub the fabric with a (clean) damp hand; for this, and for dusting (not that I do much of that) I use a plant mister of water with about 15 drops of lavender oil shaken into it.
It might be a function of air movement in the house -- if your kitchen is close to the stairs, even faint whiffs of hot kitchen air might make it out and up.
Clothing for cooks 80Mine's at the correctr height, too, but I'm afraid I don't go quite as far as using it when I'm boiling pasta or cooking vegetables...
I know it. Worse than that, though, are the smells that rise upstairs when the cats use the litterbox in the middle of the night :-
regards sarah
-- Think of it as evolution in action.
