Increasing Shelf Life: Green Onion

When i was in San Francisco this past summer, I stayed with my dear Sidney, whose kitchen was stocked full of fresh produce that I could play with.  Because she and her roommates are cool San Franciscans, they get a goody box of fruits and vegetables delivered to their apartment straight from a FARMER.

Anyways, one of the things she gets in the goody box are green onions, and she had a really neat idea for increasing shelf life of green onions that I had never even thought of.  She put her green onion (or scallions, it's the same thing) in a vase of water on her windowsill.  They sit there, growing roots and sucking up delicious water, innocently awaiting the day they will get picked out of the vase and sliced up into food.

So i tried it.

I got a tall glass...which ended up being a Blue Moon glass I got from a neighbor who worked at a bar.  And I just stuck my green onions (the kind you get in a package at the grocery store) and stuck them in the glass.

Okay, so i turned the glass around so that i don't have a beer logo staring at me every time i go into the kitchen.

There.  Aww look at the cute little rooties.

And because the green onions are kinda alive, drinking water like a bouquet of flowers in a vase, they last a whole lot longer than keeping them like this in the fridge:

And you can just pick one out when you're ready to use them.

Okay, make it your mission to pick up a bunch of green onion next time you're grocery shopping.  I think green onion tastes WAY better than onion.  And I know some people have issues with the texture of onion, but this is an herb-like green, so you don't have that problem.

A little language lesson (come on, just let me).  But i did a cut so you don't have to be nerdy if you don't want to.

In English, the word for the veggie below is onion

while the word for this is green onion. 

But in Korean, the word for this is pa

and the word for this is yang pa ('western pa').

So for Koreans, the basic vegetable is the green onion, and the onion is the western version of a green onion.  Interesting, eh?  Apparently the same is the case for Cantonese.

Nerdism over.