Grilled Leeks

I’m not going to lie to y’all, I was nervous about this one. Plan of attack with the vegetables is mask them in other tasty things and then cook only them with seasonings if desired. Leeks, being that they are just onions, made me nervous. When was the last time you took an onion and just ate it like an apple? Or had a whole plate full of just cooked onions? Don’t get me wrong, I adore onions in food, but I rarely ever cook and eat them alone.

I pared it down to the usable stuff and cut them in half and rinsed them off but kept a little bit of the bottom intact so they wouldn’t fall apart. Again, it killed me to throw out the leaves, but I think next time I’m going to save them and make stock, maybe you’ll get a bonus post later on.

When I was making the soup I really thought the leek smell was pleasant and reminded me of sunshine and spring. This time, maybe it was because of my nerves, I just smelled onion. I had flashbacks to a certain ogre who eats them raw and freaked out slightly.

They got a coating of olive oil, some salt and a generous hand of pepper since I love it. I will also admit these are slightly faux grilled. There is still snow outside, I’m a wuss about being cold, and I just didn’t want to deal with the grill so I used the indoor electric grill possibly endorsed by a former boxer. (I’m not taking any chances with copyright stuff, can you tell?)

I looked up how long to cook them on it and it only gave about 3-5 minutes so I threw them in there after slathering them up and let them sizzle. I thought about onions my parents would make when they would make chopped steaks. They would throw in some worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper, and wrap them up along with the steak in foil. I think they called those hobo steaks but the onions that would come out of that were delightful.

I knew this would be the best way to taste leek though, I knew I would end up drowning the thing in worcestershire if I did something like that. I must say though that I bet that would be delicious.

I took them out, let them cool a bit and took a bite. They are not kidding about those outer green leaves. I got the tender and tasty inside layers but the outside green sheath refused to break apart. I could have cooked them longer I suppose, or just taken off the dark green parts, but the insides were too delicious to turn back. The charred parts really got my taste buds running and I could really see myself cooking these as a side in the future.

I used four leeks for this so I had eight stalks of grilled leeks and I got three in before I got a little bit tired of eating that onion flavor. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy them, I did,  but my fears of having all day bad breath and tasting onion at every meal took over as well. I want to revisit this in the warmer months possibly and put these on the charcoal grill. I guarantee flame grilled leeks are to die for if the electric grilled ones are this good. We should be grilling more vegetables!