Scallions are a staple in the everyday kitchen, not only as a seasoning but also for preventing and treating illnesses, making them both a fine vegetable and a good medicine. Before stir-frying, you can chop them with ginger and sauté them in oil until fragrant; for a finished dish, you can also sprinkle raw chopped scallions on top to enhance the flavor. It can be said that scallions are a versatile ingredient, suitable for all kinds of cooking methods like pan-frying, stir-frying, steaming, and deep-frying.
Scallions have green tops and white bottoms. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, scallions have medicinal effects such as sterilization, promoting lactation, diuresis, inducing sweating, and aiding sleep. However, in daily life, people are accustomed to using only the white part and discarding the green leaves. Song Shuhui, a researcher at the Beijing Vegetable Research Center, explains that the green part actually contains nutrients not found in the white part, such as chlorophyll and carotenoids, and should not be easily discarded. Chlorophyll has important health benefits for the human body, such as resisting radiation, clearing toxins, and strengthening muscles. Of course, if the leaves of northern scallions bought are old, withered, and yellow, this part can be trimmed off.
In addition, people often only eat the celery stalks and the heart of radishes, which are also habits that can be corrected. Modern research shows that generally, dark-colored vegetables have higher contents of carotene, riboflavin, and vitamin C than light-colored vegetables, and they also contain more phytochemicals. In the same vegetable, the vitamin content of the leafy part is usually higher than that of the root and stem; for example, the leaves of lettuce, celery leaves, and radish greens have several times more vitamins than their corresponding stems and roots. It is best to eat these vegetables along with their stems and leaves.
For example, you can stir-fry celery leaves with eggs alone, use them in soups, or mix lettuce leaves into cold dishes; when eating radishes, eat them along with the skin and greens. This is both nutritious and delicious.