Onion Saver

Here's a helpful food and garden tip, the kind of old timey advice you'd find in a corner of my small hometown newspaper.

I've been getting a lot of onions and garlic from our CSA. Normally I'd braid the stems and hang them in a cool but dry dark place, but these are coming with the stems off. Knowing that with so much piled in the onion/garlic basket in the kitchen, it would be only a matter of time before rot set in and wanting to hold these alliums for fresh use if at all possible, I was thinking of ways to best keep them. Then I remembered Alton Brown's Vidalia onion episode where I'm pretty sure he hung the onions in old pantyhose, with knots between each onion. When hanging you can work from the bottom up, cutting the section holding the bottom onion below the knot and the rest remain in place. It's been a few weeks and everything looks fine. The stockings allow plenty of ventilation and cradle the bulb to avoid bruising.