Onions: Sweet not Squishy

Last week at Farmers’ Market many of the vendors were not found in their normal places.  We had to improvise and re-arrange at the last minute due to the fact that the fairgrounds had been taken over by the power company as grand central station for their out-of-state crews who had been brought in to rescue us in the wake of our major storm.  I hope that customers and vendors alike did not see this as an inconvenience, but rather, made the best of the situation and were grateful to the men who traveled far away from home and put in long, hot hours to restore our power.  I’m not sure if the camp will be disassembled in time for market this weekend or not, but if they are still there, please still come on out and see us.  You may have to look a little bit harder to find your usual vendors, but rest assured we will be there with lots of fruits and vegetables and smiles on our faces.

            One of my major projects for the last couple of weeks has been harvesting the onion crop.  This is one thing that doesn’t seem to have been much affected by the drought this year.  Planted at the end of March and first week of April when rain was still abundant in early in the spring, the onions must have received the right amount of moisture at the right time, because even without any irrigation, I seem to have the best onion crop I have ever produced.  The size of the onions seems to be bigger than average. 

Last year, which was an extremely wet year, it seemed that when I pulled the onions out of the ground, the outer layer of the onion, which helps protect it so that it stores well, was often wet and squishy, rather than dry and papery as it should be.  Not being well versed in vegetable diseases and problems, my friend Jim quickly came up with the name “squishy onion syndrome” or “SOS” to describe this problem.  I quickly adopted this terminology but, luckily, this dry year seems to have made “SOS” much less of a problem and I look forward to having bushels of onions that will keep well into the fall and winter months.

When I was in college I lived in a house with seven other girls. One of my roommates, Katie, had a summer job at a day spa in Northern Ohio.  This day spa was kind of a fancy place and the following recipe was served to the guests as a main course for their luncheon.  This is a very simple dish, much less fancy than I thought it was at the time, but we would make it often when were entertaining guests (aka boys) for what we considered a fancy dinner in our not-so-fancy college house.

Chicken Purple Onion

·         Two large sweet purple onions

·         Two chicken breasts

·         Six slices of bacon

·         Ranch dressing

Preheat oven to 425º.  Slice Red Onions into six thick slices (about ½ inch).  Slice chicken breasts into ½ inch thick strips.  Place Red Onion slices on greased baking pan.  Take chicken strips and place them on top of onion slices, wrapping the strips in a pinwheel manner to fit on the onion.  Take a piece of bacon and wrap around the outside edge of the chicken, securing with a toothpick.  Top each chicken/onion pinwheel with a generous dollop of ranch dressing.  Bake about 20-30 min. until chicken is thoroughly cooked.