Sprouting Onions

Ever have this happen? You reach into your cupboard expecting to pull out an onion, and instead you pull out a shriveled, papery, wrinkled thing with pale green shoots coming out the top. That happened to me tonight.

Instead of shrugging it off and tossing it all away, I’m excited to have blanched onion shoots! As in the gardening term for blanched, not the cooking. Very tender and mellower than the onion itself, I’ll use them diced in chicken noodle soup and/or shepherd’s pie since my husband isn’t such an onion fan. (Honestly, I’m not a huge onion fan either, but they give a great flavor to crock pot recipes.) I have a bunch of batch cooking to do for lunches, so this will be a welcome addition.

I’m trying to be less wasteful in the kitchen, and even though I wasn’t able to get to the onion in time, it makes me happy that I was able to make use of the sprouts. And really, the rest of the wrinkly mess didn’t go to waste – it went into the compost which will eventually grow more onions or other vegetables. Had it not been so past its prime, it would have gone into the broth bag – my freezer bag of veggie bits and pieces that gets turned into broth.

So, the next time an onion sprouts on you, just remember you now have Blanched Onion Shoots. People probably would pay big money for that type of thing, it sounds so fancy.