"sweet onion" news and stories

I have been a fan of Kettle Chips ever since I tasted my very first kettle-cooked potato chip at the age of 8. Crunchy, deliciously greasy and salty, it was the ideal potato chip. During my childhood, Kettle's flavored chips were special occasion food in my household, purchased for gatherings, parties and road trips only. I dreamed about the Yogurt and Green Onion flavor and during high school would sneak off to the Safeway near campus for a bag of New York Cheddar.

It seems that each year, the folks at Kettle Chips out-do themselves, creating new and addictive flavors. Just a few weeks ago, they added some really creative flavors to their line-up, including Sweet Onion (near and dear to me, since I went to college in Walla Walla, the town so nice they named an onion after it), Baked Sea Salt and Vinegar (healthy!), Backyard Barbecue (tangy and addictive) and Buffalo Bleu (all the goodness of wings, neatly packed into a chip).

Make sure you try all the new flavors soon, as they're perfect for game day snacking. And keep your eyes peeled for even more snacking goodness, as the People's Choice flavor election will be coming soon!

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Until 3:30 pm yesterday, I had had a colander of yellow string beans sitting on my counter since Tuesday evening. Every time I walked into the kitchen, I'd look at them and send them a little unspoken promise that soon I'd turn them into something wonderful. Yesterday afternoon, I decided that they'd been patient long enough. I fired up a pot of water and gave them a quick blanch. I ran them under cool water to stop the cooking and returned them to their colander home, but this time only long enough to run to my local Trader Joe's in order to pick up a few things for the salad I was imagining.

At TJ's, I grabbed a container of perlini (the tiny ones) mozzarella balls, some fresh basil and a couple of ears of corn. I brought it all home, pulled out a few ingredients I already had, did a little chopping and threw everything together. When it was all done, it tasted like I had captured summer.

photo by Marisa McClellan

While once it seemed as though the only onion options were the generic sounding yellow, white and red, each variety of onion in the market is now labeled clearly - and there are a lot of them, in addition to those three standards. But what is the difference between them? The primary difference is sweetness, with some onions, known as sweet onions, lacking the sulfuric bite that most associate with an onion.

Sweet onions usually are available in summer and have a higher water content than so-called "storage onions", which contributes to their mild flavor. It also means that they have a somewhat shorter shelf life and are more delicate, prone to bruising, than their less-sweet counterparts. They can be used interchangeably with regular onions in cooking, since they will handle almost identically, but they will impart slightly different flavors to the finished dish. Many people prefer sweet onions in dishes that call for raw onions, such as salads, or for use on burgers and hot dogs.