I've always found that chilling the onions before chopping reduces the weepy effect.

That's my first line of defence, but it doesn't seem to work for me. Damn it.

I'm very thankful that all my local markets sell fresh onions, and fresh garlic, and all sorts of fresh prep veggies (celery, carrots, etc, as well as the stinky yummy stuff) already chopped.

Kristin - really? Or is it fiction? Do you guys not do Home Ec at school? 'cause if not - wow. Bless you.

Not Kristin, but at our school, Home Ec was an elective. My mother wouldn't let me take it, or sewing for that matter. Something about academics blah blah blah. :)

Ah. I went to a painfully old fashioned school. Sadly we didn't get the chance to do Woodwork or 'boy' type useful things, but we had to do Home Ec until we picked GCSEs (ie until we were 14). Cooking and sewing. Sewing I'm not so good at, but I can fix holes in things. (And, hell, last term I taught 20 kids how to sew bags out of recycled clothes/pieces of fabric, so I can't be that bad. They made some smashing things, too!) but the cookery I really appreciated. Wish we'd had stuff like 'how to wire plugs' and so forth too though, 'cause that would have been handy.

We had the mandatory home ec in my junior high school. Even with it, they didn't teach me any more than my mother did. In fact, she taught me a lot more. I could make a mean meringue by the time I was 10, long before home ec, which didn't teach us that. About the most complicated thing we made was potato pancakes. Same with the sewing. I'd already won a prize in a local sewing contest by the time I had to take it in home ec. I got to make slightly more complicated class project because I was so ahead of the other girls. I was just interested in all that stuff as a kid and loved to watch/help my mother. She was very good about encouraging me to try new things. I couldn't understand how so many of my fellow students didn't have at least a rudimentary knowledge of any of it. Until my daughter came to live with me, then I understood. My mother had the patience of a saint.

I don't remember home ec at any of my US schools. I would have been too young for it in my UK schools, which stopped when I was not quite nine years old.

I suck at sewing, cook and bake by instinct and training, and am lousy at woodworking for the same reason I suck at sewing: you need math sense. There's geometry in there, which I can do, but also algebra.

I wish I'd taken a few practical courses like that, Fay. Agricolae / agricolarum / agricolis / agricolas hasn't come in handy. Who knew?

Oh, we had to do Latin too. But only for two years (and I was in the Latin-for-pillocks' class in IV Middle, having been pants at it the year before). You beat me, though - all I remember is 'amo, amas, amat'

For us, all foreign languages were electives. Most years, I only had two free periods in which to take electives, I took Spanish from the 8th (when the started offering it, in my town) through the 12th grades, and Latin in the 9th grade, and again in the 11th grade. I forget why I didn't take it in 10th grade, or what I took in its place. I took art classes, probably, or maybe voice lessons.

I leave the root end on the onion and try to work fast. Usually that way I'm only beginning to tear once I'm done.

I didn't learn to cook till after college, except for some basic cookie and appetizer recipes, since I didn't have a strong interest, and my mother preferred doing it herself to forcing a complaining daughter. She did, however, enlist me for enough holiday prep work that I knew the basics of working with all the common vegetables.

Now when I offer to cook dinner at my parents' house, I always hate the prep work because my mom doesn't have any good knives--they're all too dull and too short. I don't see how she hasn't sliced her hand open on those things.

I went through my grandmother's high school yearbook (1934) with her a few years ago. They didn't have Home Ec. as a regular class, but there some sort of extra-curricular cooking club, I forget what it was called, but from the pictures it was mostly fancy baking. On the next page was the girls' rifle team. Made an interesting contrast. She wasn't a member of either club, but I asked my grandmother whether the rifle team ever brought in game for the cooking club, and she laughed, and said no, they were limited to paper targets at the range. The rifle clubs (boys & girls) were discontinued in the '40s.