The New York Times has a fascinating article today about the human sense of smell. A researcher quoted in the piece offers this little at-home experiment.

Get yourself a bag of gourmet jelly beans (I splurge on the sugar pellets in bulk at Metropolitan Market) and taste each flavor. Then hold your nose and give the beans another pass. What happens? No nose means no taste except a bit of sweetness, right? It's no coincidence that wine experts wax on about a bottle's smell. It's intimately intwined with taste. (Although I've never been able to pick up on the tobacco or leather undertones that some wine critics cite. Maybe my sinuses need a good shot of wasabi.)

More from the article:

Olfaction is an ancient sense, the key by which our earliest forebears learned to approach or slink off. Yet the right aroma can evoke such vivid, whole body sensations that we feel life’s permanent newness, the grounding of now.

Anyone care for a madeleine?

That last line is the one that resonated for me. I get a whiff of basil, and I float back to the first summer I spent living away from home as a young adult. I was interning at a newspaper in Springfield, Ill., and had been gifted a little pot of basil for my apartment balcony. It was the first time I'd been fully in charge of feeding and caring for myself, and my first homemade tomato sauce with shards of hand-torn basil was transporting.

I'm sure I have a thousand more sense memories if I sat down to parse it. But I want to hear from you guys. What smell sends you back?

Hi.

Breakfast seems like a promising platform on which to introduce myself. My name is Kelly, and I'm a copy editor at The News Tribune. I also write for our blog GritCity. But I'll be pitching in here on the Diner, too.

Maybe it's my voyeur side, but I'm one of those people who watches what comes out of the kitchen and what table it's headed to.

I post food pictures on MySpace.

I want to know what you're eating, and how it was.

This site gets my obsession. Photographer Jon Huck takes portraits of people and what they ate for breakfast.

The images have an intimate quietness I dig, capturing that moment of stillness in the morning when there's a breeze through the window and fresh strawberry jam, that sweet balm.

It's almost enough to make me an optimist.

Anyone been out in the berry fields yet this year? I fear I missed strawberry season, but with this chilly, wet, late summer, maybe there's a flat of stragglers left over that'd translate to some jam or a simple no-cook pie. I remember one summer back home in Illinois where we macerated tiny homegrown berries with a little sugar, then piled them in a baked pie crust and let the whole thing ooze and chill till it reached ambrosial sweetness.

How 'bout it, any U-pick reports out there?

Thanks to a reader tip, my story about pie is well underway.

This morning, I was amid pie. As in a dozen bowls of pie fillings (peach, raspberry, pumpkin, apple), and a good dozen or so par-baked pie crusts. Assembling them was self-proclaimed Pie Goddess Suzie Sidhu at Cafe Panini in Enumclaw. East Pierce county types might remember her from the Sweet Shoppe in Buckley (and she still lives in Buckley). Earlier this year she took honors at a Food Network food challenge. Her winning pie? Well, you'll have to read next Wednesday's food section to find that out.

Suzie told me interesting things about how to construct an award-winning pie, and now I'm in the mood to eat it. Which South Sound restaurants or bakeries have great pie? Especially fruit pie. I could really go for a slice of blackberry ... right.... now.

Forgive me for blog cross pollinating here, but in my other job as a garden blogger here at the TNT, I have become smitten with lavender. Smelling it, growing it, eating it. I've shared that last nugget lately, and people look at me like I'm nuts. Why would you want to eat something that tastes like granny's bath salts, right?

I thought that too before I actually ate lavender: I was visiting Chef Jerry Traunfeld in the kitchen at the Herbfarm years ago for a chef profile I wrote while at another newspaper. He was making a foam soup (yes, soup). I'm pretty sure it was cantaloupe. It had lavender in it. I thought he was nuts. Then I tasted it. Whoa. Of course in his hands, any ingredient magically worked. In my hands? Not so much. Cooking with lavender at home takes experience. I'm pretty terrible at it.

Instead of cooking (badly) with it, I'd like to just eat it at someone's restaurant. So in the South Sound, who has lavender on the menu? Where can it be found? It seems I rarely see it on menus. What's the reason for that? Too weird an ingredient?