I absolutely despise eating raw onions, back in the Midwest where I was born and raised, I did not grow up with them being common sustenance. I prefer that they be cooked at least a little bit to cut down on the sharpness of their taste, but my number one preferred way to eat them is when they’ve been sautéed to limpness, to the point that their taste is actually sweet. Think of onions and mushrooms that accompany a meal, for instance.
Unfortunately, I now live in San Diego, mere minutes from the Mexican border, which means that around here there is a LOT of that culture’s influence in how things are eaten. Raw onions are a staple of everyday eating here, so in my decades of living here, I have become more accustomed to it, but that is not to say that my preferences have been altered.
One garnish that is offered for a lot of Mexican food is pico de gallo (translates to beak of the rooster). It is comprised of raw onions, raw tomatoes, raw peppers, lime juice, and salt. All of the veggies are diced to minute oblivion. The list of ingredients may vary also. Certain recipes or dishes of Mexican food include pico de gallo mixed into or cooked into them instead of as a garnish, while in others it is offered on the side.
The day before yesterday, I requested an order of carne asada (roasted meat) fries to go, it was drowning in pico de gallo. The order was so large that I couldn’t finish it in one sitting, so I put it in the car while I was running errands. As soon as I pulled up at the house about 45 minutes later, my wife was next to the driveway watering her plants and talking to them, I opened the rear hatch of the SUV and she said, “WOW, IT SMELLS LIKE ONIONS IN THERE! What did you buy, a 20-pound bag of them?”
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I will be one of the first people to admit that it tastes great, but with the caveat that I think it would even taste better if the onions were sautéed, and in fact, the peppers too. If they didn’t have that sharp and harsh onion taste and pepper taste, the whole garnish would be a lot better. I can’t stand having onion breath; I know how much it turns me off when others around me have it and don’t even seem to care because it’s so accepted. Yuck.
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“I think I'm going to make some French onion soup with mushrooms soon. It's been a while and it is really delicious!”
Questions: what time should I be there, and what is the dress code (or the undress code, if that’s how you roll, cough, cough.)
P.S. On the serious tip, thanks for the nod about my comments on the proper way to prepare onions for consumption.
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Any hopes of reconciliation were just dashed. Both raw onion and guacamole? Really, Spunky? REALLY? You clearly never wanted this relationship of ours to work, that’s obvious to me now. Grrrrrrr.
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I knew about the mayo. That’s what prompted the divorce in the first place. Grrrrrrr.
:(
That’s just normal behavior on my part. One can never have too large of a tilde collection.
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