🌿 What's Up & What's Cooking: Baby Bok Choy, Green Onions, and Cilantro Edition

The garden is stepping into its late Spring rhythm, and a few green powerhouses are already ready to hit the kitchen. Right now, we’ve got Suzhou Baby Bok Choy, green onions, and volunteer cilantro all looking flawless. It’s a very green week—and we’re leaning into it.

🪴 What’s Up in the Garden (…and Likely Fresh at Your Farmer’s Market)

🧅 The Onion Patch (aka: actual magic)

Our main onion patch is about 14 by 9 feet. We planted somewhere between 1,100 and 1,200 onions, and it carried us through the entire year—right up until about a month ago. Since then, we’ve only bought one bag of onions. Just one.

The timing worked beautifully. As we used up the last of our storage onions, our green onions—aka scallions or spring onions—started coming in. We plant a side patch in one of our raised lettuce beds just for that purpose: to harvest early onions without disturbing the ones meant to reach full maturity.

We also chop and freeze some of the mature onions before they sprout, just in case there’s a gap between harvest and regrowth. And you know what? It works. You can literally live off your onion patch for a full year. It’s magic. They’re fresh, they’re flavorful, they’re yours—and there’s nothing like pulling an onion from your own soil when you need it.

🌱 Green Onion vs. Spring Onion vs. Scallion—What’s the Difference?

Scallions (also called green onions): harvested young, no bulb, very mild.

Spring onions: more mature, with small round bulbs and sharper flavor.

Green onions (as most people say it): casual umbrella term for both.

What we’re harvesting right now likely qualifies as spring onions—those lovely in-between onions with juicy greens and small, flavorful bulbs. Call them what you want. The important thing is: you don’t need to go to the store.

🥬 Bok Choy & Its Timing

We planted two kinds of bok choy this year: Suzhou Baby Bok Choy and Joi Choi Bok Choy, both sown on April 22. Only the baby bok is ready now—tender and crisp and just asking to be stir-fried. The Joi Choi is still sizing up and will likely be grilled whole once it's ready.

🌿 Wild Cilantro (aka: the garden that gives back)

Cilantro comes back every year all over the place. It reseeds itself—tucked along garden edges, near tomato beds, and beside the onions. This week, the cilantro is young, vibrant, and utterly perfect. Not yet bolted, not bitter—just soft and fragrant and ready to shine.

🍽 What We’re Cooking With It

Tonight, we’re throwing all of this green goodness into one of our favorite dinners: spicy tofu with a serrano-cilantro-lime sauce, topped with sprouts, sautéed baby bok choy, fresh green onions, and a generous handful of our most tender cilantro.

It’s bright, spicy, and full of garden flavor—every bite a little different and completely alive.

🥬 Baby Bok Choy

We cook the stalks and leaves separately for the best texture contrast—crisp and tender in the same dish. Other favorite uses:

Stir-fried with garlic and sesame oil
Lightly grilled or roasted
Sliced raw in grain bowls
Quick pickled

🧅 The Many Lives of Green Onions

Grilled until sweet
Chopped raw into salads and salsas
Stirred into soups, rice, or dressings
Tossed on anything that needs a burst of fresh

🌿 Our Favorite Cilantro Moves

Blended into sauces or marinades
Scattered fresh over stir-fries or tacos
Cilantro Chutney (Coriander Chutney)
Wrapped into spring rolls or layered on bowls
Roots saved for Thai paste (one of The Savage Feast staples)

📸 Coming Soon: The Recipe

We’ll be sharing the full spicy tofu recipe soon—so you can try it with whatever greens and herbs are thriving near you.

Oh, and this recipe includes one of our kitchen staples: homemade vegan fish sauce. We make it exactly like the recipe by the Korean Vegan, and once you have it, you won’t want to cook without it. We’ll be sharing that recipe soon too. Or better yet, go to her website and make it today!