Onions

My oldest sister, Janet, and her husband, Bob, had all of us over for a bbq dinner. Well, all of us except my sister, Kathy, and her husband, Bob, and Michelle and Michael... who were busy all day, like the day before, going to graduation open houses. I think they had 4 yesterday.

Dinner was wonderful. Bob grilled pork tenderloin. MMMmmmm! My brother, Jim, and his wife, Sue, brought a bunch of Morel mushrooms, which Sue fried up. They were superb. Janet made potato salad, and I baked some beans. I also stuck a couple of chickens in the oven with a Bud Light up their butt, & they turned out pretty darn good. We usually make beer-butt-chicken on the grill, but that takes a long time and you have to babysit it. Oven style was A-OK. Much easier. I also found 3 packages of smoked sausage in the freezer, so I made up a sauce, kind of like a sweet and spicy bbq I guess, sliced up the sausage and cooked in the sauce in a crock pot for hours. Wish I could remember what all I put in that sauce because that turned out pretty darn good as well. Sauce was great on the chicken. We all stuffed ourselves and then watched a DVD ('National Treasure', great movie). We'd planned to have a campfire, but it rained.

One thing about our family dinners is that us girls always have to remember to cook differently, that is, NO ONIONS. My dad and my brother both hate onions. Growing up, we never had anything with onions or garlic in it, and I thought I didn't like onions. As a young adult, it didn't take me long to discover that I LOVE ONIONS. And garlic. My kids tease me that I would even use it for an ice cream flavor. Most everything I cook (and I love to cook) has onions and/or garlic in it. It's difficult for me to cook without them, really, and sometimes I flub up and put 'em in without thinking when I'm making a dish for a family get-together.

At the dinner table last night, the conversation turned to onions, as it often does. I think we end up talking about onions because I or one of my sisters will end up assuring my dad or my brother that, "yes, you can eat that, it has no onions in it" or "Dad, don't take any of that, I threw onions in it by mistake."

Dad was saying that once he ate baked beans somewhere and they put onions in them. He was aghast that someone would actually even think of putting onions into perfectly good baked beans, and that it was a strange combination anyway. I disagreed, of course, and said some baked bean recipes need onions. (I usually make my beans with just maple syrup and dry mustard, with a little molasses added in, and my dad loves my baked beans.) Dad said that the Germans and Dutch (his ancestry) would put onions in EVERYTHING, but never in baked beans. By this, I think he meant to explain that if the German and Dutch cooks didn't use onions in baked beans, then onions and baked beans were never meant to be together in one dish.

Since my gramma was Dutch and married a German, my brother said something like how Dad must have had it rough as a kid... hating onions so much and having a mom that cooked freely with them. Dad said, "Nope, my mom spoiled me. If she made fried potatoes, she would make a small skillet of them on the side without onions for me. But on the few, very few, occasions when my mom went away, which was probably only four times in my life, my gramma would cook for us. Gramma thought she was clever, she'd add onions to everything, and she'd add them to the side skillet and try to get me to eat them. She'd say, 'it's all in your head,' and I'd say, 'of course it is, Gramma, that's where my taste buds are.'"