When Good Onions Go Bad
Wherein the blog post starts with a brief digression into onion prices. The other day at Trader Joe's, I picked up one of their "Onion Trio" mesh bags which contains a red onion, a yellow onion and a white onion. Name becomes kinda obvious then, doncha think? I like onions and I seem to be particularly partial to red onions these days. But I don't use a heck of a lot of them being a single guy 'n' all. So I picked up the bag and hat the native wit to look at the price before I dropped it in my shopping bucket. $2.99. Paging Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to aisle 2! A dollar per onion! I do not think so.
Instead I grabbed a bag of yellow and a bag of sweet onions for about the same price as the "trio." At home I put the onions in a paper bag more to get them out of the way than properly store them only to find a little spot of moisture on the bottom of the bag the next day. That's not good. So I pulled out all the onions and wiped them down only to find no moisture. Hmm. Oh well. Back they went into the bag. Naturally I had to check the bag again and damned if there wasn't a new spot of onion exudate. This called for further investigation.
The Sherlock Holmes of the kitchen finally tracked down the culprit. One onion was rotting from the core. The outer four or five thick layers were fine, firm and dry but the center was like a reverse twinkie: full of nasty softening, gooey onion instead of delicious creamy filling. And the remains of the stem was actually wicking out the spooge. Bad onion! Bad!