Angry (with) Leeks

So, we’ve been dutifully plowing our way through the never-ending supply of root vegetables brought to us by our local box scheme. We’ve not known what to do with some of the things – such as parsnips & swedes – but other, more familiar things have been just as shocking. Take, for example, the leek. Now, in the US, we think of leeks as rather bland, sort of onion-like vegetables, and there aren’t too many recipes that centrally feature them — they’re good in soups or roasted with other vegetables in gratins and such. The few times we’d buy them, they’d generally be disappointing, as they were just rather crunchy and fairly flavorless. Well, the UK must have some radically different soil! Leeks over here are … well, angry. We now understand that the Welsh may have had something going when they chose their rebellious national symbol.

The box scheme has been giving us leeks, and we’ve been eating them – in casseroles, on pizza, and finally as a leek soup, to get rid of all of those which hadn’t made it out of the fridge fast enough. We decided, after a few leek salads, that we needed to cook the things, ’cause they were very persistent, sticking with our digestive system for hours, if not days. Well, in all of this, we’ve also found out that leeks have a darker side: they are quite high in oxalic acid.

For those of you who are prone to forming kidney stones, or who have certain enzymatic deficiencies (like this one), oxalic acid is not your friend. In fact, oxalate has had us going crazy, going to the doctor to try to figure out why T’s anemia has returned, leaving her with no energy, and joint pain. We’ve been looking into all manner of our food choices, trying to track down whether we’re getting different additives, when all the while it’s been …the leeks. Sigh. Angry leeks, indeed.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.