Thursday, April 28, 2011

Saving it for Later - Wild Onions

We’ve had an insane amount of rain this past week, but today we were spared the precipitation and had a sunny, albeit windy day.  Perfect time to pull some of the onions out of the front lawn:

I’ll use the fresh bulbs like garlic and the tops like chives.  But since I just can’t see using the billions of onion tops in our yard this spring, I figured I’d dehydrate some of them for use later in the season.
The bulbs themselves taste more like garlic than onion.  The middle part is pretty much too tough to eat, so I just use that part in soup or stews (and toss them when done), and the green tops have a very, very strong onion flavor.  But after dehydrating the tops, they lost some of their “oomph” and had a very mild, pleasant onion taste.

I’m hoping to do some more dehydrating this year, especially if I can get my herb garden as large as I’d like it.  I really like herbal teas so I’m planning on putting in a bunch of mints.  Since they are such a prolific plant, I was thinking of keeping them somewhat contained by planting them in tractor tires.  Now I just have to find some more tires! 
Or I can just steal the tires from the goat pen as they don’t seem to appreciate them.  Who would have thunk it?  Goats not jumping all over huge tractor tires. 
Ungrateful little buggers.

2 comments:

  1. I am hoping to do more dehydrating this year also. I just dehydrated a whole bunch of potatoes.
    You can dry just about anything... I am going to try to dry cabbage this year. I'd love to have wild onions in my yard.

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  2. Great idea! I keep forgetting because my dehydrator is stored out of sight (and out of mind, apparently).

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