Chopping Onions

 Chopping Onions

We all have tasks we despise doing because of the difficulty and unhappiness they bring us. Sometimes, maybe it’s best to consider other options to make certain tasks not so despicable in the long term. Maybe the best value is found in considering the quality of life that doing things differently may bring.

Chopping onions has become the bane of my existence. It makes my soul cry. But we eat a lot of onions. So I am doomed.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit melodramatic, but I really don’t like chopping onions.

The alternative I suggested was to buy the already diced onions from the grocery store. My husband balked at the expense of that, claiming he would chop the onions instead of me. Yeah, right. His hands are worse than mine.

“LIFE CHANGING!”

Dicing onions with a knife was a source of chronic frustration, and becoming ineffective. Because I was no longer going to keep doing it the “old”way, there was a choice to make-either eliminate the use of onions, or find a new way. My solution to excluding onions altogether, then, was the purchase of the food chopper.

Food Chopper

Pictured is the food chopper I bought, which happens to be from Pampered Chef. No, I’m not trying to sell you on purchasing from Pampered Chef. Although, I do like the many products I have acquired from them, this is not a promotion. This is an article about the cost of a product compared to its ability to enhance one’s quality of life. That’s how value is determined.

I am hesitant to buy plastic products due to the negative environmental impacts, but also because the quality of the product is often poor. I must say, this particular chopper is easy to clean, and it’s held up well to regular use and abuse. I even dropped it on my hardwood floor, and it didn’t show so much as a crack! I still have to slice the ends off the onion, remove the skin and cut it in half before placing it in the chopper, but it’s many times better than the slice-n-dice by hand and knife.

Now, and I don’t think I can emphasize the distress of this enough, instead of crying over the task of dicing up one onion as needed in a recipe, I can do a whole bunch at once ahead of time. I can chop them, and store them in the refrigerator to use as needed. This not only saves time and heartbreak, it also saves me from shedding tears. I love eating onions! But despise having to prepare them. Also, my hands don’t work as well as they used to, suffering from age and disability, so the onion chopper saves my frustration from asserting itself when my hands wish to not cooperate. I say that’s a win-win for me, as well as for anyone present to witness the cursed event.

It saves me emotional energy, as I don’t have to despair over the headache-causing event that comes with the decision to chop and add one lonely onion to a recipe. I can just happily open my container of already prepared onions, use what I need and put the container away until next time. I prefer to chop up as much as I anticipate we’ll use in the week ahead, then do more chopping the following weekend.

So, just to reiterate, the benefits gained are time, energy and family relations. Often times, you really can’t put a price on that.

Thank you for reading this. If you liked my writing, please subscribe, comment and click the heart.