Scallywags

Eats shoots & leaves

There’s good reason why scallions woof. Inside their svelte little figures, you’ll find a party of brilliantly smelly sulphur compounds. That honk is our friend. The lovely allium family contains a pharmacy of goodies like quercetin, sulfides and thiosulfinates that should help our body fizz with form. These include garlic, leeks, scallions and onions.

Quercetin has been shown to exhibit good leadership in our body’s own anti-inflammatory squadron. This is proving useful for the relief of symptoms associated with asthma and hay fever. We like.

Then there are all those sulphur compounds, known to cosy up beside calcium in the body. Best pals, I believe. The journal Nature published research demonstrating the importance of a sulphur-rich diet for good bone health.

Admittedly, it was a lab test with pesky rats. But the results were intriguing — rats who were fed dried onion daily had 17pc stronger bones in comparison to the rats who received none. Early research suggests that one of those smelly compounds found in onions could distract and interfere with the buggers charged with breaking down our bones. Honk on!

These spicy eggs are mad easy to whip up for breakfast, lunch or supper. Butter and cream are supposedly the best allies to making the perfect scrambled eggs, but something very special happens when they cavort with coconut oil. And please don’t forget the baby tomatoes. They lift the dish visually and flavourally (my new word).

The flavour is umami, a Japanese word which does not translate easily into English, but has become known as the ‘fifth taste’ — a sort of savoury deliciousness. A