Preparing to Cook Leeks Vegetables Recipe

"Hi! I'm Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to show you how to clean and prepare, for cleaning actually, a leek. Leeks are great to use in all kinds of stocks; usually seafood stocks, chicken stock, vegetable stock, they are a great addition. At first glance, you notice the similarity to green onions essentially. The green onions and chives that usually come from this will come from the top of the leaves as well as the base. As you know from a green onion, its a much more dense and compacted along the stalk here and a little less on the leaves. So with leek, we just kind of want to take off those leaves. So I'm just going to make a cut with my utility knife here and takes these guys off; move those. On the base, I don't want to cut too high up this direction above the roots simply because it will pull it apart. So I am going to get as close to the base as I can still leaving everything connected. That way, remove that. What I like to do is cut these in half at this point, straight down the center. That way we can rinse the inside as well as the base and as we cut this direction, we get some nice little half circles that come off of the leek here and they are nice and uniformed. I'll come back in just a second, rinse these guys and show you what kind of cuts we can get out of these."