— Linda Kolberg

This applies to really all vegetables, right? We say things like one cucumber or one onion, one head of lettuce. And because these things are, um, you know, from nature and have to do with the variety and where they're grown and how they're grown, they can really, um, vary greatly in size. Um, so, you know, this is why recipe writing is a bit of an art and a science because you're trying to be precise, but you're also trying to understand kind of the reality, the lived experience of regular people who, when they go to the store, if they know they have to buy an onion and use an onion and a recipe, that's easier for them to think of, well, how much onion is a cup of chopped onion, right? Like, you might not make that association. Um, but to answer your question, when you think about onions, and of course there's more than just three sizes, but let's just say for the sake of the conversation, we'll characterize them by like large onions, medium and small. My overall kind of disposition would be that the small onion is gonna be, uh, by weight maybe four or five ounces. Certainly not more than than that. Um, your medium onion might be double that, so maybe it's eight ounces, and then your large onion might be double that again. Maybe it's a pound or 13 ounces or 19 ounces, somewhere in that, again, all using us, uh, weight measures. Um, if we're talking about a 16 ounce onion, we're talking about a, you know, 450 grams give or take of, uh, of, uh, of weight. So that of course translates to different amounts of volume. So if your recipe's calling for a cup of finely diced onion, that will be more weight than a cup of coarsely chopped onion just by volume, because you're gonna have in the coarsely chopped onion, a lot more air gaps and space in between the onion and you'll have less onion per volume. Um, but I also find that just sometimes you go to the supermarket and those are, you buy onions individually. Those are pretty big onions usually, um, to buy small onions. I really only see those when you buy like a bag of onions, you buy like a bulk two, three fou, you know, pound four bag where it's in that mesh sack. And that's, that's kind of where I see the smaller onions and that four ounce or so weight, weight size. Um, good thing about the onions is like, if you just feel like there's too many, what you could do is just, you know, caramelize them, put 'em away, use 'em on some other thing. You can always add 'em to another recipe. If they've already been cut up and you don't really have anything to do with it, you can put 'em in a Ziploc bag or put 'em in a container, pop 'em in the freezer if you need to. It gets dropped into a veggie stock that you're making or you pop it into a pan that you're using to start some soup. Or I would add it to my lentil dish that I described earlier. Nothing's gonna happen with those onions. Just know that after you chop them up, you wanna either freeze them or use them pretty quickly. 'cause they're not gonna last in your fridge that well, they're also gonna smell, right. So taking care of those more quickly is gonna be a good, a good idea.