Some sweet after the bitter
Published 1:30 am Thursday, April 2, 2026
For several years, my sister and I smelled like onions. Our home and all our possessions reeked of onions, too. Our friends were kind and didn’t make fun of us, but I’m sure they could smell us coming three doors down. We would walk home from the bus stop to see our dad and his business partner in our garage, door open to let in the sun and let out the noise of the air compressors, as they peeled onions by the crate.
My dad was determined to be a businessman and, after several half-starts and regroups, he landed on a business model that bought wholesale produce from the warehouse and processed it for resale in grocery stores, the first small business of its kind in Anchorage.
It started with onions in our garage. At first, painstakingly peeled by hand, until my dad learned that a properly aimed jet of air could blast the peel off an onion with a sliced edge, and suddenly we could get through a pallet a day. This allowed him the profit margin he needed to expand, and not long after, he moved operations to a warehouse on Arctic Boulevard and hired a few hands.
We spent a summer in the cold room washing and slicing fruit for his mixed fruit tubs, applying sticker labels with pride, and likely eating more than our pay in strawberries and grapes every day. But outside of the sterile cold room was the main warehouse space where my dad had fashioned a row of stations with air compressors for the onion operation.
He bought onions 10 pallets at a time and would store them up high in loft storage. When the fruit orders had been filled and the cold room was shut down for the night, my sister and I would shimmy up the steel frame (or ride the forklift, if our dad wasn’t looking) and rest on a mountain of onions to read while we waited for his day to be done.
If the warehouse was too loud, we would sit up in the office and play endless rounds of Tetris and send joke faxes to our home office for our dad to find. If it got to 6 p.m. and there was no end in sight, we got to order sandwiches or pizza from the Flight Deck (the best toasted turkey sub in Anchorage). I wish these silly memories were the beginning of something greater, but not all stories have happy endings. My dad lost his business, our home and his spirit, and what followed were dark times, indeed. He never recovered from that loss, and I think of his pain whenever I cry slicing onions.
These pickled red onions have more sugar than burn and would be a delicious addition to a toasted turkey sub with provolone on sourdough.
Ingredients for two jars:
2 medium red onions
1 small sweet apple
1 cup apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
¼ cup sugar
Pinch salt
Directions:
Peel and very thinly slice the onions.
Core and thinly slice the apples. You can peel the apples, if you wish, but I didn’t.
Layer the sliced onion and apples in two clean mason jars and set aside.
In a medium saucepan combine the vinegar, water, sugar and salt and bring to a boil.
Pour, still boiling, into the jars of onions, filling all the way to the top.
Loosely cover and let them come to room temperature before sealing completely. These pickles will keep in the refrigerator for up to a month. Discard if the brine becomes cloudy or if you notice mold or an unpleasant smell.
