Celebrating the harvest of one onion

In our journey to live simply and independently, I’ve taken to collecting my own vegetable seeds.  This is an art in itself…takes some time to master…if one ever does master it!  Anyhow, on the way to mastery I’ll just have to relax and enjoy myself.

This year’s onion bed sported one hunkin big onion.  I was exercising major self control to not pull the darling thing and take it on a bragging tour of the neighborhood.  This onion would produce seeds for my next crop. And, what a crop that would be! 

I kept the seed heads trimmed off of the other onions because I had a mix of varieties in one bed.  I was making certain there would be no cross-pollination mistakes made while I was looking the other way.

My famous show onion put up TWO seed heads.  What a performer!  Each head was about the size of a small marble….for about two weeks.  Perhaps watched seed heads don’t grow.  Finally decided to pet them a little and give some encouraging words.  I cupped one seed head in my hand.  It felt hard and uninterested.  As I examined it more closely with the fingers of my other hand, the seed head fell to pieces in my palm.  My champion seed plans were running between my fingers like so much saw dust.  Awww!

Now we needed a suitable requiem for all my plans.  So I pulled the giant onion and turned it into beer-battered onion rings.

            1 cup flour

            1 cup beer

            sprinkle of salt

I mixed up the batter, let it set for an hour to develop its sourdough-like consistency, and fried away.  Wow!  What an onion! 

Now I’m sitting here with onion breath, looking through catalogues.  Thank God there’s more than one way to get seed!

By the way, I'm Jeanie, aka GrammyCracker.

I kept the seed heads trimmed off of the other onions because I had a mix of varieties in one bed.  I was making certain there would be no cross-pollination mistakes made while I was looking the other way.

My famous show onion put up TWO seed heads.  What a performer!  Each head was about the size of a small marble….for about two weeks.  Perhaps watched seed heads don’t grow.  Finally decided to pet them a little and give some encouraging words.  I cupped one seed head in my hand.  It felt hard and uninterested.  As I examined it more closely with the fingers of my other hand, the seed head fell to pieces in my palm.  My champion seed plans were running between my fingers like so much saw dust.  Awww!

Now we needed a suitable requiem for all my plans.  So I pulled the giant onion and turned it into beer-battered onion rings.

            1 cup flour

            1 cup beer

            sprinkle of salt

I mixed up the batter, let it set for an hour to develop its sourdough-like consistency, and fried away.  Wow!  What an onion! 

Now I’m sitting here with onion breath, looking through catalogues.  Thank God there’s more than one way to get seed!

By the way, I'm Jeanie, aka GrammyCracker.

Comments

[Amanda Rose]

I can vouch that this onion was fantastic. It is too bad it didn't have babies, but it made killer onion rings, much like tempura onions. They did not last long enough for pictures unfortunately. (Really we were too busy eating to think about photos for posterity.)