Use the foods that look like they will spoil before using the pristine items.
My chore yesterday and today was to preserve the onions that looked like they wouldn't last too much longer before beginning to go soft.
In late September or early October, I bought a 50-lb bag of yellow onions. I wasn't feeling great that day and didn't take the time to look over the bags. I simply pointed to one and asked my daughter to load it onto our trolley. When I got it home, I discovered that several of the onions had developed a powdery surface mold. We'd had quite a bit of rain in the preceding weeks. So I assume some of the onions sat out in the wet at some point. For the most part, the insides of the most affected onions looked okay. With the very worst of them, I peeled off the outer part and chopped the inner, good part to freeze in a large bag. I'll use these onions when the fresh ones are gone.
A month later, I checked the onions in the cool storage room and found about 10 that needed using or preserving right away. I decided to make onion powder out of these.
Over the weekend, I washed, peeled and began to chop the 6 largest onions. As I chopped the onions, I filled my dehydrator trays. One mistake I made was to dice the first 3 onions. After loading the trays and moving them to the dehydrator, I realized that the onion dices were falling through the openings in the tray. For the next 3 onions, I quarter sliced them, hoping fewer pieces would fall through the slots.
Anyway, the onion dices are now dry and the slices are soon to be dry. I will finishing drying the slices in the oven to speed things along.
I decided to just do the dices in the oven along with the slices. Here's what a large jelly roll pan of 6 large onions, mostly dried, looks like.
Oh my goodness! I was taking care of something else and was smelling something really, really yummy coming from the kitchen. I had turned the oven up to 225 F after a few minutes at 200 F. I overdid the onions a bit! They're browned but not burned, thankfully. When I dry onions again, I'll make sure to not leave the kitchen and set a timer!
We make mistakes, and then we learn.
After sifting through the dried onions for pieces that felt not-quite dried (setting aside to add to the green bean casserole on Thursday), I "powdered" the browned onions in my food processor.
I'm telling myself I have gourmet onion powder. Anyone can go to the store and buy regular old white onion powder. Mine has been browned. Ha ha.
So you may be wondering why I went to the trouble to dry and powder onions. I like the depth of flavor you get when adding onion powder to a dish that already contains fresh onions. It's simply richer, in my opinion.
I find that in the fall I play catch-up with several different produce items. Apples always go soft and wrinkly long before we've used them all. I made applesauce with the soft ones a couple of weeks ago, leaving the better ones to use later. Pumpkins sooner or later develop soft spots, necessitating immediate processing. Those 3 large pumpkins I mentioned cooking and pureeing before my oral surgery? I didn't process those because I was being efficient and getting ahead of the game. No, I noticed soft spots on those 3 and absolutely had to cook them before I lost them altogether. These are the large, jack o'lantern pumpkins that I bought in late October. I still have the remaining good 2 pumpkins in cool storage. I can wait to do something with those for another week or maybe two. Potatoes will also go wrinkly, soft, and begin to sprout at some point later in the fall or early winter. I will need to sort through those and use the worst of them in December.
With the onions, while it would make for pleasant cooking experiences to just use the best looking ones right now, it makes for better stewardship of our supplies to use what will go bad first. I will use more and waste less by using food items in this order, worst condition first, best condition last.
My big chore is done for the day. I have a pumpkin and chicken soup cooking on the stove for dinner. And now I'm resting for the remainder of the afternoon. I went too long before taking more pain relievers and now I'm waiting for this dose to kick in. A piece of dark chocolate should help.
Thanks for reading along. Enjoy the rest of your day and evening, friends!
