Onion weed grows everywhere in New Zealand and is considered a noxious weed. Why  it hasn’t become a national ingredient is beyond me. We have a lot of onion weed in our backyard and I found out a little while ago that it was edible, but I hadn’t decided how to use it in my cooking.

Our neighbour came around to our house last week – he and his baby daughter like to visit Tofu in the garden every now and then. My neighbour’s wife is Mongolian and he mentioned that Mongolians eat onion weed. His wife uses the leaves and flowers in dumplings. I often use spring onion or chives in pork dumplings, so onion weed would be an easy substitute.

My first attempt to cook with onion weed was nothing fancy, just some scrambled eggs.

My bouquet of onion weed, sage and coriander just before I chopped it up and added it to my scrambled eggs.

Onion weed scrambled eggs with an onion weed flower as a garnish.

The flowers have a much milder flavour than the leaves with only a small allium flavour. The leaves taste like chives. They are in the same family as chives, so no wonder.

I’m totally cooking with onion weed again. The leaves can replace chives or spring onion in any dish and the flowers have a delicate taste and are pretty to use as a garnish.

Here’s a article on onion weed in New Zealand by Wild Picnic.

Also a pretty cool recipe for onion weed flower tempura.