Send me an email.

I never was quite sure what the point of this post was. I suppose no one else was either.

Absolutely yes you can eat those green tops of mature plants! I say mature plants because scallions are only the tender young greens, and not just all green tops. And I'm assuming you mean the mature green tops that ate past scallion stage. I point this out because the growth difference in how one can or shouldn't use it depends on age. Like with chickens. Scallions are pullets, scape and leaf harvest are fryers, and bulbs are roosters. Not much good in rooster age greens. But darn fine bulbs. Garlic scapes in tender stage are amazing fresh sautéed or chopped up as a fresh green garlic at the end of cooking or raw in salads and such. Slightly less tender scapes of just a week or two later picking are beyond amazing pickled. I always reserve my scapes for pickling. They are beautiful coiled up in the jar to boot. garlic greens are tougher, not so good for fresh eating by harvest time. And usually curing time kind of leaves them for crap for dried eating. However, at the same time I harvest scapes, I also harvest a leaf or two from each plant to directly rough chop up like kale and dehydrate. The resulting garlic leaf is a nice addition to stock making. It gets strained off and discarded with the rest of the solids. I haven't used it in soups and such, it's kind of tough for that. I use onion greens too. When onions go out of season, and this is usually late winter around here, I put aside the spoilers and sprouters that come up and pot them up in pots on the kitchen window. We trim off onion tops like chives to throw into all sorts of cooking. It's a nice fresh onion spruce up at those end dreary days of winter when we are running on a lot of canned, dried and frozen stuff, and nothing else is growing fast enough, lol. And they spend themselves out by mid spring when lots of stuff is flush. Harvest time onion greens can be good for dehydrating too if you treat them like garlic and pick a leaf or two off each one a wee bit prior to bulb harvesting. Onions are a bit more tender IMO. Dried, they are good in stock, soups, stews, and powdered up to add to various seasoning mixes. As a pickling addition. I've used fresh onion leaves as presentation addition. Tastes good after pickling too if the leaves are at that late tender stage like garlic scapes for pickling. And I've never found that culling out some leaves early hurts the plants at all. Nor does culling out the scapes, I'm of the camp that it's good for the bulb.

I've been buying Gourmet Garden for decades. I mainly buy the lemongrass and cilantro. I've been buying garlic and ginger in jars at the Japanese market for a long time also, and they are perfectly acceptable for use in soups, which I make frequently. I also have ginger in the freezer, but it's much easier to use it from the jar. The tube would not last me very long. I've bought Amore tomato paste in a tube before, but now I use tomato powder. It does tend to clump, but I keep several desiccant packets in the jar, and that helps. It's much more economical than the tomato paste in a tube and to me it tastes better. In fact, I prefer tomato powder to canned tomato paste - the powder has a sweeter flavor. It helps if you store it in glass jars instead of the plastic ones that it comes in, and I also vacuum seal the glass jars.