Best ingredient ever (but biggest pain in the ass)

Everybody has a favorite meal, the thing they'd eat on death row or on a desert island. But how about favorite ingredient? Mine changes often, but lately it's been onions. Any kind. All kinds.

The best part about onions is that they are the base for so much else. They are the main ingredient in mirepoix (one of the most common bases for stocks, soups, purees, etc.). I load up my tomato sauce with the suckers, sometimes overloading on them (think Vinny from Goodfellas). One of my favorite soups is vichyssoise, made with the venerable leek. I'm about one step away from eating the damned things like apples.

My love for onions is tempered by one fact: I'm not good at cutting them. Only a few days into my culinary program, we've already diced a number of veggies--potatoes, garlic, green peppers, chilis, carrots, shallots and sweet onions--to learn different techniques. I like to think I'm pretty good, and even expedient, at cutting most of these. But when it comes to dicing onions, I'm pretty inconsistent, even though cutting onions is one of the most basic knife skills.

Inconsistency is the thing you don't want to be in the cooking world. Innovative chefs that create masterpieces are all well and good, but if you can't make that masterpiece exactly the same 500 times in a row, then you better go back to peeling potatoes at Applebee's.

I've learned, though, that you can get away with inconsistent cuts when making mirepoix (two parts onion, one part each celery and carrot) and when you're trying to "sweat" them for a dish. That's because mirepoix gets strained out and chucked, so a perfect dice is unnecessary (though you want small pieces to maximize how much flavor leeches out into the stock). When sweating onions and other veggies for a stew or sauce, a lot of times you can get away with a "rustic" look because the vegetables are hidden by tons of other ingredients. Hell, the rustic look may even be preferred (you can just tell your friends you were trying to cut the onions in a rondelle or something equally ridiculous that few would call you out on).

If you're going to carmelize onions, you want a perfect dice, julienne, whatever. Small onions will burn while the larger cuts get only partially soggy and develop a mild brownish color. In other words, you get inconsistent crap.

A little trick I tried (which is good for home cooking but would be ridiculous in the commercial kitchen) is to reserve the really small pieces of onion--which come off the edges of the round shape--for the mirepoix, while using the cuts from the center of the onion for carmelizing and sauteing. If you don't need a mirepoix, then I toss in those smaller pieces after the bigger pieces have already started to cook. It's kind of a Rachel Ray-esque bullshit method, and I'm sure somewhere Anthony Bourdain is putting my name on some kind of poseur list, but so far it seems that cooking is all about what you think works best.

Or, what your executive chef tells you to think.