Souper String Theory with Onions and More

This article is about wonderfully silly things I have been doing in my kitchen now that a certain (dis-)organization doesn't want me to be a chemist for them any more. Well, at least part of the (dis-)organization doesn't seem to want me. You can take the chemist out of the chemical plant, but you can't stop him from inventing with chemicals from other plants: Food

1. MSG: Managing Sour Grapes

The best way to handle sour grapes is to eat them with good grapes alternating between the two OR three kinds of grapes. And very cold almost frozen grapes are such a delight.

2. Fun with Your Toaster

Caution: Avoid hot surfaces and wear proper protective gear when holding objects near an electric toaster.

Toasters can be a great deal of fun. I obtained some pumpernickel rye bread that was too long for my toaster. So I learned that I could toast one short end of the bread by holding the piece of bread with my hand a safe distance from the heat of the toaster. Then I dropped the uncooked main portion in the toaster to get a fairly even toasting of the whole piece.

Here is where it gets totally fascinating (not really, I just had to say that). Tonight I took a regular sized piece of light colored wheat bread and made it go from uncooked on one side to burned on the other in a gradual manner. I accomplished this feat by slowly and evenly dipping the piece of bread in and out of the toaster.

3. ATF (Avoid Tomatoes Falling)

Tomatoes are not really good at staying inside a sandwich, whether as a sliced entity or even as ketchup.

(They must be affected by gravity
more than other foods, I have found.
Perhaps it is because the tomato has spent
so much of their lives just hanging around
and now before they are consumed
they just want to touch the ground?)

Here is a trick I have devised to keep the tomato on my sandwich longer. I slice the tomato in a spiral manner creating incredibly long single thin tomato pieces (an entire tomato sans inner and end pieces). So now there is less tomato sandwich slippery-age.

(If you didn't notice on the first pass through, I was trying to make the 3rd item look like a tomato sandwich, red between two pieces of brown)

4. Souper Strings of Onions

The spiral tomato idea gave me another idea to try this with onions that I sautee for my soups. I cut them by the same spiral technique in incredibly long pieces. I try to cut the onion piece so the cutting depth matches the width of individual spiral pieces. So far I have only tried these in a buffalo chili where I sauteed the onions first with jalapeno peppers in some bacon grease. The result was an incredibly strange looking snake-like thing showing up in my soup. I hate to use the word 'worm' because I have never seen worms this long. The next thing I want to try is serving super souper sauteed cebola strings mixed in with spaghetti. I guess I could call this invention "Anaconda Angel Hair Pasta" (Cebola is the Brazilian-Portuguese word for onion and has an 's' sound at the beginning and the Anaconda is a long snake from Brazil) I have only experimented with purple onions so far and will try other varieties soon.