Don't Toss Those Onion Scraps

Like most people, whenever I cut an onion for cooking, I've always thrown away the ends and the dry, papery skin that surrounds the fleshy, edible layers. However, this is in fact a big mistake. Although you cannot eat onion skin, it has a lot of flavor in it. You can keep a bag in your fridge or freezer into which you can put onion skins and the drier outer layers of the onion that you peel off. From time to time you can boil them down to produce a flavorful broth for cooking. Just tonight, I boiled some onion skins along with the bones from some chicken I cooked and stripped for soups and stir-fry. I got a fair amount of broth that filled the kitchen with a mouth-watering scent.

It's now in a stainless steel bowl in the refrigerator, cooling enough that I can pour it into peanut butter jars and put it into the freezer until I need it for soup or other cooking projects. Although some people also put the ends of their onions into the bag for cooking stock, you can also start new onions with them. Especially if an onion is beginning to sprout, you can set the top and bottom in a shallow dish of water and they will produce roots. Once you have a solid root network, you can transfer them into potting soil to establish themselves, and then plant them in your garden. You can harvest them as green onions, or you can leave them to set bulbs. When you harvest them, save the ends and start the cycle all over again. You can also grow an endless supply of green onions from a single bunch of store-bought green onions. Instead of using them all the way down to the roots, cut only the green parts and save the small white bulb to which the roots attach. Set them in water, and they will soon produce fresh leaves. At this point you can either plant them in your garden or you can keep them in water and harvest an endless crop of hydroponic green onions. You can even do this if you live in an apartment, as long as you have a window at which you get decent sunlight and where you either have a window ledge or room for a small table.