Know Your Onions

Spring onions (also sometimes called scallions, green onions, salad onions and various other onions, depending on which country you live in!) are in season now and happen to be my first "crop" ready to harvest his year.

The beauty of these is that they are effortless to grow because I planted some a few years ago and never managed to pull them all out - just left some of them to die down (out of laziness rather than forward planning) but every year, more come up again and every year I never quite get around to using them all, so the cycle gets repeated. 

I'm not too keen on them raw in salads and sandwiches, but they are great for adding flavour to stir fries and chopped up finely and sprinkled on top of a home made pizza (along with a few other ingredients, of course!).  The chickens love them, and can demolish a spring onion in a minute, given the opportunity.

At the moment, I'm picking them fresh from the garden but once they start to lose their green tops, they should probably be picked and they store very well in the fridge in a flat plastic container (like a take-away container) if they are rinsed well, and trimmed at the top and at the roots and stored with the lid on.

They will also store well on the kitchen windowsill if placed in a tall glass and filled with about an inch of water to cover the roots.  Change the water about every couple of days.  I put more water in the glass here as I wanted to take a photo with the bubbles in the water!