[Upbeat piano music.]
Anita: Leeks. They look like onions, they are onions. They look like our little
green onions that we get in the spring and they are very related to each other.
This is a little small, this one's really big. I'm gonna show you how to
do leeks in the two easiest ways, but the most delicious way to enjoy leeks is
in leek soup. I have that recipe on my website.
So, basic preparation is this is one of the dirtiest vegetables you're going to
get in the grocery store.
I'm going to show you how to do it the easy way. Some people used to just cut
this in half and then they would try to wash it. My way is very easy. As you know,
I like to do things easy. You do have to cut off the root end and it's usually
quite dirty. As you can see, it's not a real clean thing. So we just toss that
away. And then you'll notice that this goes from white all the way to dark green.
The darker the green, the less likely it is we'll be able to consume it. So what
you usually do is you go where the white ends and you go about an inch and a half
up, maybe two inches, and you cut right there. That makes the--this is the most
edible part of it. Now this is like, I don't know, I feel like I could do
flooring with it or something. But it's really nice. It's really pretty. It shows
how it's all done. But you'll also notice that this is where most of the dirt is.
So I don't put it with my edible part. So I throw this away. Now you do have to
open this up and you do have to check for dirt. It could have slid into there while
it was developing, so I'm going to cut it down the middle. And then what I would do
is I would just take it apart. Do you see how it's just different little layers?
It does need to be washed. So, I'm going to show you what I've done. I did this a
little earlier on one and I've put it in water and I've let it just sit there. I've
fumbled with it a few times and I made two changes of water. I do see a little
dirt in the bottom, but not much at all.
And then what you do is you just pick all these up because this is the part you want
to eat, and all I've done is I've sliced this into fourths. And so now, I'm picking
it up and I'm going to braze this, as they call it. I'm going to make this on the
front burner here and turn this up and then we'll put this in with the water
that's still connected to it into this pan. I've got some butter, but you
can use your favorite oil. You don't need much, you just want some in there. And
then you just let these start cooking.
Now, you might have wanted to slice these a different way and I'm going to do that
now with this next one. I don't feel like my flame is on. There it goes. So, for
this one, what I've done--let me move this out of the way, our dirty water--what
I've done is I've cut these into fourths the long way, and you'll see it just
becomes. And it has a very mild, onion-y flavor. It's milder than the bulb onions.
Then I cut these in half. Now, they're going to shrivel up a little bit when
you get finished, so I just cut these down the long way, so I've got the fourths,
and then I cut these in half.
Now, there's two basic ways to cook them: you can braze them in an oil, like I've
done with the first batch, or you can boil them. Now, the other thing to watch
out for is that when you get these here together, this one feels a little tough
to me, the one on the outside. So I might take that off. Ah, this one feels better.
So you just have to kind of get used to that, but you know, even if you cook it
and it's tough, you can get rid of it after you've cooked it, so it's not that
big a deal. So, the other way to cook it is to boil it. And you want to boil it
about 10 to 15, maybe 20 minutes, depending on how you've cut it and how
tough yours is.
So we just sprinkle that in to boiling salted water. This has about a half a
teaspoon of salt. And we just put those in. Let me get the rest
of these here. And we want to stir that so that it gets them all wet. And then I wait
until it comes to a boil before I put my lid on and I kind of watch to be sure that
everybody's covered up and everybody's swimming in the water here for us.
And then you want to test them;
Before you decide they're all done, be sure and taste one.
Take out a piece and taste it.
So those are the two basic ways. I'm going to stir up this one that has the oil
on it. Just want to keep them coated.
And now I've got 'em pretty coated and I can see that they're all kind of
starting to limp a bit, so I'm going to put my lid on the pot so that it takes
the moisture, doesn't dry them out too much. Now on my website, I do have
that recipe for leek soup. Leek soup is totally onion and if you don't like the
onion, then you want to add the leeks to other pots of different kinds of soup
as the onion part of it. You can use these in place of bulb onions if you'd like to
have a milder taste. So I want to do a little bit of biology with the leek.
So this is the leek and then these are our spring onions. I want to show you the
great similarity. But the similarity ends in the fact that we can eat the whole
length of the spring onion, or the green onion as some people call it.
Now, both of them can be dirty in the green parts, so when I am
preparing these and I want to eat the spring onions for raw, I just cut
off the ends with the root and then I do the same thing I do for the leeks.
I come up here where it's near the green, where all the junction is, and I take
these off, get rid of those. Now I usually pull off the first one because it's kind
of been manhandled. But if you'll see, this one's not very dirty, but some of the
others are, and if you'll notice they are in the same little design of weaving.
I call it like they're woven together. So then on this one, I'm going to cut off the
main part and then you can take these and be sure they're clean by running them
under water. This is a very clean one.
And being sure they're clean before you chop it up. And then on the other end,
where it's all been kind of mangled, I usually chop that off. Now, the really
nice things about these is that you go all the way to the end and you can use
them all, you can eat them raw, you can add them to your other dishes.
So that's the similarity between the leeks and the spring onions.
They come off about the same time and, as you can tell, they're very related.
Now, the leek, when you're trying to decide where you're getting
down to the softer one, you can kind of start looking at it.
You can peel these off and there's the dirt up there.
But the leek is one of those vegetables that I think a lot of people overlook,
because they don't know exactly what to do with it. There is quite a bit of
waste with it because you don't eat the top leaves. But go to my website and I'll
show you how to do more with the leek.
If you haven't tried it before, during the spring, they're pretty reasonable
in the stores.
[Upbeat piano music.]