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| "Convenience". Really? |
Over at Epicurious, someone surveyed the NYC grocery shelves in the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, and was surprised to find that stocks of onions were depleted. After all, as the saying goes, everything starts with an onion. Then I discovered these packs of prechopped onions in a local store.
I am appalled by this. Firstly, ounce for ounce, these pre chopped onions are almost 10 times the cost of the whole onions. Not 10%, but a whopping 900% . There's nothing to cutting up an onion - there's no seed to deal with as is the case of a mango or an apple, and just about the entire plant is edible (one should be so lucky as to find onion flowers). I've heard arguments that it takes too much time, or that it would require a food processor.
Poppycock.
About the only things you need are a sharp knife and a chopping board, and even for a novice, cutting up an onion should take less than a couple of minutes - you'll spend about that much timing waiting for a pan to heat up. Of course, I advise not rushing for any novice in knife skills for safety purposes. But the real secret: despite the admonitions of needing even slicing and dicing, most recipes will do just fine if the onions were just roughly cut up any which way. No food processor needed.
Perhaps then, with the money saved, you can donate it to the Red Cross for Sandy relief.
Another fun fact: Veggies that have been pre-processed, chopped, etc, are *far* more likely to have become contaminated by Salmonella and Listeria. You're more likely to get contaminated by a washed, pre-chopped salad, than by buying the head of lettuce and making it yourself. Same is true for onions, natch.
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