What’s at the Farmer’s Market? Spring Onions

I've written before about how spring is a season of surprise, a season of expectation.

Every week at the farmer's market, new vegetables pop up at different stands. In the first few weeks, new products sell out to the early, ambitious shoppers. And so, for those of us who take a later and slightly more dignified approach to the morning, spring vegetables come to us faster than they grow. Much like the little cousin you see once a year, spring vegetables seem to grow quickly, and in stages.

If you track the progression throughout the spring, it's also a progression of color palates. Rhubarb, for instance, first appears small and green, growing larger, and ever more red, with each week. Asparagus, too, has shades of green, purple and white.

Recently, I've been watching the spring onions as they fan across the market stands each week. At first, they were no larger than a thin scallion. But now, they're larger, and their colors more bold.

They start bone white and moss green, and grow into a lustrous purple that deepens each week. Robert Pincus over at Gourmet says that he is compelled to buy "at least one bunch of each color." I have a similar instinct. They're like the gobstopper pearls of the market; beautiful, colorful, and ever so slightly immature.

And so you buy a bunch -- maybe two or three. What do you do with them?

Well, consider that spring onions, if ranked on the Kinsey scale of the lilly family of vegetables, would fall somewhere between an onion and a clove of garlic. They are milder than onions, and don‘t have the mineral bite of garlic. Sounds like a shallot? Yes, almost -- they're sweet, small, and used more often than people think.

They're often confused, too. People see them and don't know whether they're spring onions, or scallions, or garlic, or the more rare l'itoi onion of the Southwest.

Last weekend, I diced them as you would a scallion for scallion pancakes, and cooked them in a large pan of scrambled eggs with cheese and smoked salmon, washed down with a freshly-squeezed mimosa. What more could make for a Sunday brunch, I don't know.

They also work very well with seafood. Try mussles cooked in a cast iron pan with butter, broth, white wine, spring onions and parsley.

Or a spring soup. I'd suggest using them in your mire poi, in place of spring onions. Add a lighter vegetable stock that won't trample the delicate taste of the spring onions and then add your choice of lentils, and anything other vegetables that suit your own taste.