It's my onion, and I'll cry if I want to

I cut two whole onions today. And boy did it make me cry.

I was making sauce, or gravy as a lot of Italian-Americans from the Northeast call it. I was making a lot of sauce. See, I don't know how to make just a few meatballs. And I decided to make a few extra for giving away to some friends who are going through some tough illnesses. Naturally, that meant a double batch of sauce too. And it starts with onions.

It seems like a lifetime ago that I managed a Subway franchise. One of our prep tasks was cutting onions. We had this old, but extremely handy slicer with a handle that rolled a blade and then voila! Sliced onions. We would slice them pounds at a time, since we went through a lot in the course of the day. Especially at the Wrightsville Beach store on a Saturday in the summertime. I could always tell when the drawbridge went up, even though we weren't close enough to see it. We'd have a couple of customers and then all of a sudden, the line was out the door. Yep. Bridge was up.

Anyway, employees were always coming up with ways to avoid the crying. We'd walk into the freezer to calm the crying down (that did actually work, but it didn't prevent the crying in the first place). We'd try running them under cold water first, chilling them first. Nothing worked. Maybe it was just the sheer volume of onions we had to cut that made these methods ineffective. One of my college girls had a great idea though. She was a surfer and a competitive swimmer. She brought in her swimming goggles and volunteered to cut all of our onions for the day because she could handle it from behind her frog eyes. We loved it and she was a hero for a while.

I'll never forget this one time when I was working by myself. I was cutting the onions and just crying my eyes out. A customer came in. I went up to the front and washed my hands and asked him what I could get for him. He told me but looked a little wary. I started asking him what he wanted on his sandwich, but I was still red-eyed and sniffy and he still looked very uncomfortable. Laughing, I assured him that everything was fine and that I was just prepping onions. He gave a big sigh of relief and finished his order.

So, back to tonight. I took a quick break and went out onto the back porch to get away from the onions. Jeff immediately looked up and asked me what was wrong. Oh the things we do for the love of a good meal :-)