Tomatoes & Onions

It has been said "when life gives you lemons, make lemonade". Did you buy that lemon, or was it given to you. Either way you can make something out of it. However, making lemonade takes work to create, as does anything worthwhile. This is what steers your mind clear of the sour lemon taste. Right? What if life gives you tomatoes? How about onions? Now you have a whole different set of circumstances to deal with. There is no tomato-ade or onion-ade you can make, so what can you do? You make something different. When I was a teenager, I worked a variety of jobs. Some were great experiences, others not so much. My first "official" job was working in a kitchen at a country club at $2.65/hour. Not only was it a great way to start in the work force, but it was such a huge learning experience that I still utilize many of of the skills I learned at that job to this day. One of the menial tasks I learned was how to create onion rings. The process was simple yet lengthy. It required cracking 100 eggs into a pickle bucket, chopping around 50 onions into rings, and then dipping them into the egg batter, flour, egg batter, then cracker meal. They were then refrigerated on sheet trays before being fried into wonderful onion rings. My eyes would burn from the onions, and my hands would freeze from submersion in the cold egg batter. Onions are a vegetable that release a gas when cut and they irritate the cornea of the eye. After I became an assistant to the chef, I started to learn the first lessons of cooking. How do we make onion-ade out of onions? Sautée them in olive oil, or bread them into onion rings. Onions are one of the universal foods that can enhance virtually any dish when cooking. Yet, when they stand alone they are intense. Another job I had was a temporary summer job where I worked on my neighbor's tomato farm. The tomato is another food, a fruit, which carries an intense, acidic flavor. Most people are not fond of the tomato by itself, yet when utilized in the cooking process, it is another top ten flavor enhancer around the world. One of the great things about working on a tomato farm is whenever you get hungry from the work of picking tomatoes, you have the hunger quencher right in the palm of your hand. Periodically I would rub the tomato on my shirt and eat one right off the vine. Better yet, a ripe tomato is perfect for a full blown tomato fight. Invariably a fight would break out in the middle of the day to break up the monotony of picking them in the hot Florida sun. How do we make tomato-ade? Again, sautée them in olive oil, or create a tomato sauce, and add it to most anything. The onion and the tomato by themselves do not get much attention. If anything, they get more negative reactions than positive, yet when they are cooked and added to dish, they are 2 of the most powerful flavor enhancers. They certainly get your attention after they are heated up. When life gives you tomatoes or onions, you can't make onion-ade or tomato-ade. The only answer is to get cooking. Not only will you learn how to create some awesome and flavorful dishes from around the globe, you will get to enjoy them too. You learn what the most powerful and versatile foods that exist, and how to utilize them. These are the most powerful lessons I learned from my two of my earliest jobs. A job may not be love at first sight, nor might a food be love at first taste. If you stick with it, you will learn many things. How to utilize a food to transform a meal, and how to work a job to transform your life. There is something in every food, and every job, that can improve the zest for life.