Turning One Onion into One-to-Two Onions!

I generally buy produce as I need it, but every so often the price on bagged potatoes or onions or whatever is soooo good that I buy the bagged stuff.  And 90% of the time, I end up with a bagful of sprouted vegetables.

Sprouted potatoes are no big deal; just cut the sprouts off and cook the taters (the sprouts and any green bits are mildly poisonous and not good for you but any parts that still look like a regular potato are fine to eat).  Sprouted onions, on the other hand, are smushy and moldy and gross and I usually compost the whole bag and have a quiet rant against Big Onion (see?  Mad at everything).

But you can actually salvage a lot out of a bag of sprouted onions if you have a half hour or so to kill (if, on the other hand, you decide that your time is worth more than the buck-fifty you spent on the onions, I will not blame you).

Here is the pile of onions that I mostly already processed before it occurred to me to take some pictures:

LEFT: Broken-off tops and bits that can be used in place of scallions (sometimes they’re strong; taste a bit before using one-for-one). CENTER TOP: An onion that was mostly okay after I peeled off a few gross layers (if there are parts that are still firm and white, they’re fine to use).  CENTER BOTTOM: A sprouted onion sliced and ready to be cleaned up. RIGHT: Sprouted onion centers cleaned and ready to root.

To clean the sprout to its center, cut a slit vertically not quite halfway through the onion, as per the photo above.  Peel off all the grossness.  The grossness may be stinky, slimy, and/or moldy.   Do not falter.  Compost the grossness, or throw it out.

Most of the onions in this bag had two sprouts in the center:

Onion with two sprouts.

You can try to break them apart but I usually end up breaking one off the root entirely, so I recommend gently separating them and cutting the root between them with a knife.  Do separate them; they won’t grow well if you don’t and getting two onions from one is the most satisfying part of this whole endeavor.

Once you’ve got your onion centers with the root end still attached, you want to put them in some water until they’ve grown white roots about an inch long.  Unless you got every little bit of yuckiness off the root area, it’s best to try to keep them just lightly damp because if they’re too wet they’ll get gross again and STINK.  The easiest solution would probably be to trim the tops so that they’re all basically straight (leave at least 2 inches or so of green), tie them into a bunch so the root ends are all level-ish, and set them in a glass or a dish or something with stones and enough water to just touch the root ends.

I didn’t do that.

Instead, I took a 1-liter and a 2-liter soda bottle, cut the bottom off the 1-liter and the top off the 2-liter.  I took a paper towel, folded and rolled it into a “wick” about two inches long and jammed it into the spout of the 1-liter bottle so that most of the paper is inside the bottle.  I then arranged the onions around the wick so that each one is touching it.

Then I set it in the bottom of the 2-liter bottle [every time I try to type ‘bottle’ I must first type ‘bootle’.  I don’t know what that means about me] and added water.  Make sure the water level stays below the root ends of the onions and you should be in good shape.  Or you could just do the first thing I said, which is probably easier.  The wick technique is nice because the water-level is a lot more forgiving, but it’s also sort of ridiculous.

Keep an close eye on the whole shebang — the longer they stay in water the more likely it is any residual yuckiness will metastasize all over your new roots, paper towel, etc.  If you see the root area getting brownish, mucky, or starting to smell bad, take the onions out, gently clean the root ends, wash or replace your containers and put it all back together.

You can continue to use the tops as green onions — trimming won’t hurt them.  Once they’ve developed nice roots and it’s spring-y outside, plant them in some dirt or dirt-analog (bury the white bits, leave the green bits showing) and put them outside.  Sun, water, all the standard stuff, harvest when the tops start to wither and die, and Bobsyeruncle with just a little effort and 6-7 months of waiting you totally didn’t waste that bag of onions!

(If you find yourself with sprouted onions and it’s not getting on to spring, you can keep them in water for quite a while, but do remember about keeping them clean.  You can also try to plant them in pots and grow them indoors, but I suspect the results would be disappointing.)

Today* I Invented a Breakfast Cookie!

 

(NOTE: I actually made the cookies and started writing this post about four days ago, but hadn’t managed to finish it.  I was too busy caring for my family and frothing at the mouth over bumper stickers.)

There’s a story to why I invented these, but as I was writing I realized it was a very boring story, so let’s just skip to the how.  I also have a cookie-inventing-related rant (the more I blog, the more I realize how angry I am about SO MANY THINGS) about “healthy” food and “clean” food and trendy ingredients and socioeconomics and fat shaming and probably the patriarchy but I already spent all my rant chits on drive-by moral instruction (argh, I’m *still* rage-typing) so, later.

These cookies are made out of ingredients that are inexpensive and common in my pantry, and good for using up bits of stuff you might have left over from other baking endeavors.  They are on the dry side (next time I make them I’ll leave out the flour and/or add another egg because owning chickens=always having too many eggs), but good with coffee or milk.  They also aren’t *great* keepers (they get crumbly fast), so keep them in an airtight container or freeze them if you’re not going to eat them in a day or two.

As far as nutrition goes, in order for something to be healthyish in my book it mostly just needs to have a minimum of added sugar and no white flour.  These have no “added” sugar, but that’s totally a lie because I did use Jif peanut butter and sweetened coconut and chocolate chips. My my math says they have about 10 grams of sugar per cookie the way I made them, which is the same as the packet of Belvita cookies I was trying to replace. (NOTE: these are in no way similar to Belvita cookies; it’s just that we ran out of Belvita cookies from the Costco and LSH declares them too expensive to buy at the regular grocery store.  I can neither confirm or deny this, but anyway cookies.)

This recipe makes just six large (about the size of a hamburger patty) cookies.  If you love them, you can always make more.

PEANUT BUTTER COCONUT BREAKFAST COOKIES

• 1 egg
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips (or other sweet nuggets like dried fruit, or leave them out if you’re particularly ascetic)
• 1 cup shredded coconut (I used the regular sweetened variety; you could use unsweetened, but then the cookies would be, you know, less sweet)
• 1 cup peanut butter or other nut/seed butter
• 1/4 cup whole wheat flour (I *think* you could leave this out and no harm done but I was worried they needed a bit more binder than the egg.  I will try these without soon and report back with updates.)

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.  Put a piece of parchment paper on a cookie sheet if you want, or don’t.  You don’t need to grease the cookie sheet either way.
2. Mix all the ingredients together.
3. Form into six large balls, flatten slightly and place on the cookie sheet.  They won’t spread much so you don’t have to worry about that.
4. Bake for about 12-15 minutes; start checking around 10 minutes if you’re paranoid like me.  You don’t want to overbake these; you just want the bottoms to be slightly browned.
5. Allow to cool and eat.

There you go, a recipe without context.  I have become the thing I most fear, and it’s only been 5 days.  At least I haven’t got any bumper stickers.

Ranty Thursday — Bumper Stickers are THE WORST

NOTE: What follows has absolutely nothing to do with food, clothing, shelter, or anything even adjacent to those things.  Occasionally I just have to get something off my chest or I will EXPLODE.

—

Am I the only generally live-and-let-live, you-do-you person who can be driven into a frothing, fantasizing-about-scrawling-swears-into-a-dusty-tailgate rage by certain types of bumper stickers? Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker in a parking lot that said “I’m not driving slow, you’re speeding” and there rose up in me an unholy fire to smash out their windows with a tire iron. And I even AGREE with them – – I’m totally one of those people who goes 55 in a 55 zone (but not, not never ever, in the left lane. I’m not Satan or anything).

The thing is, message bumper stickers are just crazy covert-aggressive – – forcing me to listen to your (and of course, I mean “your” in the sense of “everyone save Thee and Me”, Gentle and Lovely Readers) opinion while your back is turned is patronizing, high-handed and cowardly. And don’t try to tell me that it’s not ‘forcing’ – – suggesting that a person behind you at a stop light doesn’t have to read your bumper sticker is 100% equivalent to siblings in the backseat doing the whole “I’m not touching you” thing. It’s like propping my eyelids open and forcing me to read your Twitter feed with the Reply button disabled. It’s ANTISOCIAL.

What proves to me that it’s the medium and not the message is that I reserve the same wrath for wildly divergent opinions – – that “coexist” with all the religious symbols (which is not ‘warmly inclusive’ and is in fact directly translatable to “ALL YOUR BELIEFS ARE EQUALLY RIDICULOUS, RELIGIOUS WHACKADOODLES, btdubs) is as red-misting as “America: WE SPEAK ENGLISH HERE” (OMG, the mist is rising just THINKING about that one).

So, please.  If you are using the back of your car to instruct strangers on how you think they ought to drive their cars, interact with the world, or live their lives — DON’T.  Seriously.  Remember how your Mom told you if you can’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it behind their back?  Try that.  If you absolutely, positively can’t stop yourself from emblazoning pithy reductions of complex issues on things, get a t-shirt.  At least then you have to look your audience in the eye.

Monday (How Are Ya Liking These Creative Titles?)

Ah, a new week.  A fresh slate.  Etc., etc.  I am doing a little better, medication-induced-bad-place-wise.  Enough that I can envision doing something other than the absolute bare minimum to get all the others creatures around here to leave me alone to wallow and watch old Doctor Who.*  Whether or not I’ll actually DO any of the somethings I’m envisioning is an open question, but at least I can envision it.

So.  Today is a good day for making lists, taking care of ticky-tacky administrative tasks, replying to phone calls and sending emails (both of which I fear worse than death for some reason I really ought to discuss with a therapist), sorting through the food in the house to see what we can eat this this week (stove is fixed hooray!)

Speaking of food, can I talk about recipes and food blogs and such for a sec?  Like everyone else who eats and has the internet, I never have any good ideas for dinner and so I’m constantly Googling variations on “dinner recipe quick cheap easy vegetarian or maybe lamb i guess leftover rice no onions why did my daughter suddenly decide she can’t swallow meat i just want some nice spicy thai food or maybe some seafood but my kids only eat ramen noodles and pizza and have you seen what fish costs anyway i’m not even all that hungry.”  But I’m always disappointed with the results; the recipes call for stuff I don’t have, or foods we don’t eat, or one tablespoon of some random ingredient that I then have to find a use for the whole container of (hello mascarpone cheese (note: mascarpone cheese is friggin’ delicious and it’s good in everything)) or it’s just WAY too complicated.

Most food blogs just present *recipes*, that seem to exist in a vacuum and are completely out of context of the idea of food shopping and budgeting and not wasting food.  And even if there ARE meal planning blogs out there (and I’m sure there are), it’s an impossibility for someone else to make a meal plan that suits my family’s (or your family’s) specific tastes and needs.  And while I can kludge together a recipe or two with an idea in my head to put something on the table, what I really need is more of a Dinner Lego Builder’s Manual, that shows me all the different ways to put basic foodstuffs together to make dinner.  I mean, I know how to do that — I’m actually pretty good at ‘pantry management’ and meal planning and food budgeting.  But at the end of the day when all I really want is for dinner to be OVER, the rubber just doesn’t seem to meet the road.  [NOTE TO SELF: WELL THEN MAKE YOUR OWN FOOD BLOG THAT’S ABOUT MEAL PLANNING IN SOME MAGIC WAY THAT WILL HELP EVERYONE IN THE WORLD MAKE A PERFECT DINNER EVERY NIGHT AND BE HAPPY FOREVER AFTER]

And can I just quickly rant about “quick” recipes? Prep COUNTS. Anything that calls for more than one diced vegetable does not take “15 minutes or less”, especially if the veg needs washed.  Any “30 minutes or less” recipe with 25 minutes of cook time is a straight-up lie unless the prep consists of nothing but the phrase “open cans/bags.”  Anything that has 10 ingredients takes nearly 10 minutes just to find and measure all of them.  Also, I don’t know what elevation these people are cooking at but at my house (2500 feet) it takes to 15-20 minutes for a 2 quarts of water to come to a boil, so trying to tell me pasta is ready in 10 minutes is pure BS.

Okay, it felt good to get that off my chest.  Anyway, I have a quick, cheap, easy, delicious vegetarian recipe for you all:

Yellow Curry Scrambled Eggs

This is a great breakfast-for-one for when the kids actually finish theirs so that you don’t get any soggy Honey Nut Cheerios or toast crusts for breakfast.  I don’t have a picture because I ate it (the eggs, not the picture).

Ingredients:

• 2 eggs
• prepared yellow curry sauce/paste to taste
• crushed tortilla chips or other crunchy thing

Preparation:

1. Mix up the eggs in a microwave safe bowl or measuring cup or whatever.
2. Microwave 30 seconds at a time, stirring between, until the eggs are softly cooked, about 1 minute to 1 1/2 minutes (for all that is holy don’t overcook them; eggs in the microwave are already kinda gross but I’m not going to dirty a frying pan just to scramble myself a couple eggs) (if you want to dirty a frying pan or if you have one of those little frying pans that makes sense to cook two eggs in, totes do that but I just have a giant frying pan that doesn’t really fit in the dishwasher)
3. Stir in your curry sauce/paste.  You could absolutely use red curry, or green, or sriracha or fry sauce for all I care but, self-deprecating snark aside, yellow curry paste is actually really good with eggs so I recommend it.  I use about a teaspoon of Mae Ploy Yellow Curry Paste. (And yes, I know I was *just* bitching above about recipes that call for a tiny amount of something that comes in a giant container and if I had to guess I’d say there’s about 10,000 teaspoons of curry paste in the Mae Ploy Curry Paste tub.  But it’s cheap and it lasts for two years and all you have to do is stir some into coconut milk and you’ve got DELICIOUS SAUCE for almost anything.)
4. Smash up a small handful of tortilla chips or other crunch-delivery system.  Bagel or pita chips would be good here.  Stir them into the eggs.  You could also add in pretty much anything else that sounds good.  This is just scrambled eggs, after all.

TL;DR: if you’re hungry, eat a couple eggs.

 

*I’ve been watching the Dr. Who reboot with Daughter for a while now and she expressed some interest in seeing some of the older stuff, so I learned that they have all the old ones available on BritBox. I freely admit that I have not exposed her to enough black-and-white media, but she didn’t even make it through the opening theme before she declared it the worst thing she’d ever seen.  I wanted to argue with her, but.

I first started watching DW while I was pregnant with Said Child back in 2009 and once I was caught up on the reboot I decided I was going to watch all the old ones.   Which turned out to be  1) really hard 9 years ago; there was a lot of semi-legal BitTorrenting involved and 2) really hard in the sense that the early DWs are BAD.  SO bad.  Like, I’m super sorry if you love them and I know there’s so much interesting historical and cultural backstory,  but the First and Second Doctors are just unwatchable and eventually I gave up.  But now that they’re easier to get to, I’m trying again.  And lately locking myself in my cloffice and binge-watching badly preserved black-and-white footage of women endlessly screaming at everything they see and an old man flubbing his lines seems more appealing than most of my other options.

Friday

My “weaning” continues apace — with luck my chemically induced, hopefully mostly concealed rage and despair haven’t scarred my children for life — and it’s not helping with the housework, either.  Plus, did I mention that my stove hasn’t been working for a week because we ran out of gas?  I’m like seriously.  Luckily we don’t use gas to heat our home (we have that pinhole-chimney wood stove for that), but it turns out that when you’re barely functioning as a human being, having to get creative with meal prep doesn’t make it more fun.

Ugh, whine much?  Sorry everybody.  What I came here to say is that squeezed into the hours of Best Fiends and advice column reading that gets me through bad days [ASIDE: I would LOOOOOVE to be an advice columnist. Laugh if you will, but I believe the screwedupedest make the best advisors about problems they have muddled at least some of the way through, plus chances are they’ve consumed their own weight in advice too, so they’re standing on the shoulders of giants], I managed to ensure that all those around here who need to eat things had things to eat even if those things were not always what they wanted, clean clothes to wear if they chose them [Daughter is going through a phase where she will not change, or even take off, her clothes for days at a time. After many efforts to explain, negotiate, demand and plead that she do the thing I want that she doesn’t want, I am doing  my very very best to ignore this.  Folks, if you encounter stinky children in the world, when you mentally say ‘why don’t the parents help this poor sad stinkbomb who is sure to be ‘that smelly kid’ forever after in school and life’, please consider that it’s likely child’s parents are letting them experience the consequences of their own behavior and/or have one of Those Children who  will grow up to be World Changers and Captains of Industry and Strong, Capable, Fierce Women and Men but who as children are hard pigs to steer*], and a warm place to shelter in the cold of February who I’ve already mentioned is a dick and March who is not shaping up to be any better.  I also did some jeans embroidery and threw a few repeats into the Wool Eater afghan I work on when find myself sitting on the couch without my telephone:

So that’s what I’m up to.

*I Googled and apparently this is not an actual saying, so it sounds horrible and like I’m calling my daughter a pig.  But we say it in my family all the time, it means a person who is strong-willed and difficult to negotiate with or even point in the ‘right’ direction.  I’ve continued to Google (because my calendar is totes clear, right?) and for the life of me I can’t find a similar saying although I’m sure there must be one…