Baby onions & shallots

Hey-ho,

A deep and meaningful post today. One to lift one's heart to the very highest of spiritual ecstacies...or not.

On Saturday I made the mistake of giving Ken my Thai cook books and saying, 'Here you go darling, pick a recipe and after Quaker meeting, we can go to the Asian supermarket and get the ingredients and make it tomorrow for dinner.'

Ken picked a recipe with a long list of tasty ingredients, lemongrass, cardamon, cinnamon, nutmeg, shrimp paste, coriander seeds, garlic (120g of the stuff), coconut milk...yum yum yum. Two of the ingredients were shallots and baby onions. We bought some baby onions in the Asian supermarket, and then toddled over to another supermarket to buy shallots. There really didn't seem to be any difference between them - except the shallots were marginally bigger. They looked, smelt and tasted identical. So why were they listed as two separate ingredients - can anyone enlighten us, are baby onions and shallots the same thing?

Let this be a lesson to you - Ken picked one of the tastiest recipes in the book, but also one of the most complicated. Three hours later, with a kitchen splattered in shrimp paste, our hands reeking of garlic, a very very tasty curry emerged - but it took three hours of mixing, pounding, blending, stirring and frying to get there. Do not give men cookery books and tell them to pick what they like!

So - baby onions and shallots - does anyone know if they are different?