Edna Lewis' 2-Ingredient Southern Side Is Perfect for Spring

It takes under 10 minutes to make.

I recently had the pleasure of attending a dinner honoring the legacy of Edna Lewis at The Roosevelt, a restaurant in my city of Richmond, VA. For readers outside of the South, you may be forgiven for not immediately placing the name, but here in Virginia, we know Edna Lewis as culinary royalty. Affectionately dubbed the "Grande Dame of Southern Cooking," Lewis was a chef and cookbook author who celebrated seasonal Southern food in all its glory.

My dog-eared, food-splattered copy of Lewis’ "The Taste of Country Cooking" came to me at an important time—just as I was learning to embrace rather than run from my Southern roots. In its pages, I found recipe after recipe celebrating all the good things that grow right here in my home state.

Keeping It Simple

At the Roosevelt dinner, I remembered a powerful lesson embedded in Lewis’ cooking: Simple is best. That message inspired me to dig for more examples. I found one stunningly simple recipe that's a perfect example: Edna’s Skillet Scallions. It's an easy sauté of just scallions (AKA green onions), butter, and absolutely nothing else.

I always have a glut of scallions in the crisper drawer of my fridge because I use them often to top rice and season dumpling dipping sauce, two things my family eats all the time. In the spring and fall, we get big bunches of scallions from our farmer friends, and luckily they last a decent amount of time compared to some of the season’s more fleeting produce.

I rarely think to prepare green onions on their own, and this was a great opportunity to see exactly what they could do.

Read More: The Only Way to Prevent Green Onions From Getting Slimy

How To Make Edna Lewis’ 2-Ingredient Skillet Scallions

Preparing (or "fixing" as my grandma would say) skillet scallions is as easy as it sounds. Heat butter in a pan until bubbling, add cleaned whole scallions, and pop the lid on to allow the scallions to steam in the frothy butter and the little bit of water that still clings to the freshly-washed alliums. Flip the scallions after a few minutes. Another two or three minutes later, a star is born.

In the recipe, Lewis notes that the scallions she uses are pencil-thin. My scallions were a bit on the bulbous side, so I halved them lengthwise, delicately bisecting the white onion-y end and slicing straight up through the greens. Occasionally I’ve bitten into a grilled whole scallion and found it too fibrous and stringy for my liking, so this was meant to mitigate that toughness, and it worked beautifully.

The recipe also calls for three tablespoons of butter for four whole bunches of scallions, which is a clue to me that Lewis’ bunches might have been smaller than the ones I’m used to. But no matter—this recipe is intuitively scalable. Use however many scallions you have and a nice pat of butter.

Skillet scallions are an easy side dish that go well with a wide variety of dishes. I love it as a compliment to roast chicken or whole roasted trout, but it’s also a nice choice for a meal of all veggies.

Read the original article on Simply Recipes.