The Aura of French Toast

This past weekend, my husband made French Toast. I have never liked pancakes, waffles, or French Toast because they are usually served with maple syrup and, as a youngster raised in the midwest, we only had the syrup made primarily from the fake stuff - high fructose corn syrup with flavoring - the type that turned my stomach when I smelled it. However, for the past 10 years of our marriage, I have developed a new found love for this wonderfully delicious syrup that comes from the maple trees in the northeast where we live:  Vermont, New York, Maine, and Canada. Whenever we travel to these areas, we often go to street fairs and little county shops, where we will most often find and  purchase a sample of local syrup as long as it was easy to carry back and we treat our maple syrup like it were a precious souvenir from that area.  So on Sunday while I was up on the 3rd floor of our home tinkering around, the aroma of egg-battered whole wheat toast sprinkled with cinnamon traveled up to my sensitive sensors and immediately lured me to the kitchen with the taste of the velvety smooth maple syrup on my tongue. I devoured my little 1/2 slice of toast, but secretly wanted another, but since I am always counting calories, I did not even ask for more.  That 1/2 slice satisfied my wanting. Smell and taste are housed in the olfactory system, and housed in the oldest part of the brain where memory is stored. With my new found obsession for natural and pure maple syrup, I can finally help erase my memories of the smell of mass produced maple syrup for the wonderful smell and taste of "the real stuff".  Natural is always better.