Paying homage to a staple veg
Emily Horton shows love to the humble onion
AUTUMN and winter are not my favourite times of the year.
As seasons go, I rank these seasons last, in the kitchen and everywhere else.
I’m cold, there’s nothing fresh to cook, and it makes a curmudgeon out of me. But increasingly, I’m realising that winter cooking has an upside.
With less to work with, you focus on what you do have.
You think past your typical impulses, reframing the usual suspects. For the often overstimulated and overwhelmed, this can be freeing.
At mealtime, it means paying due attention to one of the most common yet underestimated ingredients of everyday cooking – onions.
Not spring’s precious bunching onions with their grass-green tops, or even the sweet speciality onions of summer.
I mean plain, round storage onions, the ones we rarely think about.
Onions are both foundation and finishing touch, so common to our cooking habits that to leave them out must be deliberate.
Yet despite this reliance, how often do we summon the onion for its own sake?
Not often enough, and perhaps that’s because we tend to undervalue anything we have perennial access to, anything dependable and ubiquitous.
Winter, with so few fleeting distractions outselling this humble vegetable’s charms, is my annual cue to yield more space to them on the plate.
You should always, when cutting onions (or any other vegetable, for that matter), use a sharp knife.
A dull one will bruise the flesh, which leads to ragged slices that are prone to stick to a pan’s surface.
Avoid non-stick cookware when cooking onions; it discourages proper (and delicious!) colouring. – The Washington Post