Winter cooking can be challenging. But with less to work with, you can focus on what’s available to you. That’s when true creativity comes. You think beyond your usual dinner menus and get inspired by ingredients that might otherwise get overlooked. At mealtime, it could mean paying attention to one of the most common yet underestimated ingredients of everyday cooking: onions. I mean plain, round storage onions, the ones we rarely think about—until there’s a crisis because they’re not in the house. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, an American who wrote about food in 19th- and early-20th-century London, spared no drama when praising the onion’s essential nature. “Banish it from the kitchen, and all pleasure of eating flies with it,” she wrote in an essay called “The Incomparable Onion.” “Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest dainty to hopeless insipidity, and the diner to despair.” Not…