Onions

I have it in my mind that a great cook once claimed that "all great recipes start with chopping onions," but a solid fifteen seconds of googling yielded no results, so maybe I imagined it. At any rate, almost all great recipes in the Alden-Brown-Rose household begin this way, and since onions theoretically keep very well, we grew a whole bunch this year. We planted about 1200, and I'm guessing that between germination failures and poor development, we harvested roughly 2/3 that number. Here they are lying on our wood pile.

In this picture the tops are still on, but I have since chopped them off. Most of them had wilted, though a number had not. I will be curious to see if this affects their keeping potential. After they have cured a bit more it will be time to put them into storage. Onions prefer cool temperatures, but they require considerably lower humidity than potatoes, cabbages, and other long-storing vegetables. So perhaps we will put them upstairs, where it is quite cool and not so damp as the basement. The winter squash, if they manage to ripen, will need lower humidity and a more moderate temperature, so perhaps they will get to stay in the living room.

This is a picture of my lovely wife holding a bouquet of onions that weren't quite big enough to cure.

-Garth