I hope by now you’ve figured out I’m not using the royal we in this blog. It just means that Chris is here, for most things.
That’s him below in the onion-cutting goggles I got him for Christmas, since we’re making an effort to cook more. (MORE SOUP!) And that’s me in the fancy swim goggles he got me, so that I can swim my little heart out. Perhaps you are thinking, “My, you two are certainly supportive of your mutual goals.”
But more likely you’re thinking that we’re dorks.
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DORK! Love, me.
P.S. If you’re looking for my Single Girl Valentines, they’re here on Flickr. Keep up the apathy!
They make onion-cutting goggles? Where can I find them?
but cute dorks . . . love the goggles. and the smiles.
Nichole: you can buy them online! We found them in a kitchen/cutlery store here in Chicago called The Chopping Block.
I’ve heard regular goggles work fine, too.
I want to know if the goggles really work?
They do work! It’s a little weird having them on, though, because somehow you smell the onions a lot more. If you’re cutting a lot of onions or shallots, you start to tear up just a little after awhile.
Lighting a candle also works….for some reason…..
You know, the candle trick has never really worked for me. Ditto with refrigerating the onions first or not cutting off the root end (or whatever it is that you’re supposed to do with one of the ends). Maybe my eyes are just really sensitive.
The candle trick works if you pour a glass of wine. Then drink it. Then drink another. Then throw out the onion and eat some cheese. Specially effective if you get someone to winecheese with you. Then again, maybe later, this someone decides that he wants to candlewinecheese with someone else, and you end up in tears anyway. Go for the goggles, I’d say.
Oddly enough – putting in my contacts is, for me, the best defense against onions. If I even come close to an exposed onion with my glasses on it’s tearsville, but with my contacts, i’ve made it through a 5 lb. chopping session for some french onion soup with only one tear (you know, for dramatic effect).
One of the fans of my blog mentioned this blog to me as one of her favorites, and I have to agree, it’s very charming.
As to the onion question, I’ve been wearing swim goggles to cut onions for years. I had a lot of eye surgeries and I’m very sensitive to onions. It works!
If you want to check out my bloghere it is.
If I did that funky and it came out all wrong, forgive me, I know about as much about the internet as your gramma.
Actually, I was thinking “Wow, they both have really white teeth.”
Yes, you are dorks. But very fun, sassy, silly, goggle wearing dorks.
Here is my “cure” for onion cutting. Open your mouth while cutting…but breath through your nose. Yes, you look like a horrible, mouth-breathing dork, but it tends to work!
How weird, my “cure” is the exact opposite: I breathe ONLY through my mouth, not my nose (same horrible mouth-breather look). As soon as the fumes hit my sinuses, my eyes tear up immediately. If I can kind of block off my nose, I’m golden. It’s why I assumed the goggles wouldn’t work — so excited to hear they do, I’m buying some!
From what I’ve learned of all this (via Alton Brown on “Good Eats”!), the reason we tear up when cutting onions is that onions, when cut or otherwise molested, give off some sort of fumes that, when they make contact with water (i.e. the moisture in your eyes) turns into a very low-level, but still potent, acid. It’s their natural defense against predators.
So, if that’s true, keeping the ol’ peepers hermetically sealed is probably still your best bet.
Wow. I was just going to say the goggle/story/picture is awesome… But now that I’ve made it all the way down here, the whole journey was fabulous. Esp. the candlewinecheese bit. Merci beaucoup.