That Shallot!

Having made an astonishingly speedy full recovery from my broken foot, I was back at "the office" today, and it was there that I struck upon a potentially new and arguably revolutionary method for chopping onions without tears. Mine is the sort of "office" where you will commonly find people chopping vegetables. I once walked in there to discover a 22 stone part time dvd salesperson cutting up whole dead ducks (mainly mallard, one or two teal) but that's another story. Usually this type of shenanigans would cause a rumpus, but as I have already said, that's another story.

My "office" is situated on the ground floor. One day, perhaps if I'm really good at what I do, when they've finished training the simian that has been lined up to replace me, I may receive some kind of promotion. I could move seamlessly into the next chapter of my chequered employment journal. Some folk have been moved upward in the past, never to be seen again. It's rumoured that they shape-shift into other-worldly beings and live out their hollow, dark existences wandering forever in ghostly mire and shadow on the first floor. But that's another storey!
"I've been on the R. & D. trail,
searching high and low for the Holy Grail"
I'm a poet, a fact of which
I'm fully aware".......(well, they don't have to rhyme you know. This isn't PlayAway, and though I may be called Brian, I'm not a total Cant )
The trail has left me and many like me in tears. But today's discovery has dried them up, raised the bar. Raised it high, so high that an aardvark can no longer walk into it, which destroys one time-honoured joke. It could have been a joke about a replete cow, too lazy to walk to the shed to be milked, but that's an udder story.

According to my extensive research, onions turn us into crybabies because they exude a juice which, upon evaporation into the air, turns into invisible tear gas of some kind. This I found very useful during my ill-fated single-handed assault on the North face of Michael Heseltine, but that's an utter Tory. The gas, or fumes perhaps would be a longer description, (only two letters longer) escape rather like I did, surreptitiously. However, their release into the air can be prevented to a large degree in the following way.

1: Arrange the chopping board ( correctly coloured to avoid cross contamination) squarely in front of you and secure it to the work surface.
4: Taking a freshly honed sturdy kitchen knife, remove both ends of each onion.
3: Before removing onion ends, place a suitably sized bowl next to your chopping board on the same side as your "cutting" hand.
2: Fill a bowl (correctly colour coordinated to avoid cross interior designers) with luke-warm water.
5: Drop each "top'n'tailed" onion into the bowl.
6: Boil a kettle of water.
8: Remove each onion individually from the bowl (of water) and cut into "halves" end to end. Place each half back into the bowl.
9: Re-remove each "half" onion individually from the bowl and peel the tough outer skin away. Return each skinned "half" onion to the bowl.
10: Re-re-remove each skinned "half" onion from the bowl, place on the chopping board, and finally, finely chop until fully finely chopped.(If your onions do not appear finally to be fully finely chopped, return
to point 7)
11: Place finally finely fully chopped onions in clean bowl.(colour optional)
12: Remove water from kettle and use it to make a nice cup of tea. After all, you deserve it since you've worked so hard learning a new skill today!

Et voila! That's ya lot.