In which kind of food item can x be used - offtopic?

Question

What's the difference between green, white, and red onions? has received 2 close votes.

In which kind of food items can Asafoetida be used? didn't receive any.

Can mods clear the air here as to whether these are off or on topic?

Answer 1

I think you've asked about things like this before. There are tons of old questions which (for a variety of reason) would be closed if they were asked today. We're vigilant about voting to close new questions - we see them right there on the front page. But we can't go through all the old questions and find all the ones that should be closed. So the existence of an old, still-open question doesn't mean that a new question like it will be left open. It just means that there's something that for whatever reason didn't get closed two years ago.

With respect to questions of the form "what can I use X in?" see Can I ask about how to use a specific ingredient? (AKA: Culinary Uses Guidelines) - the general summary is that asking about what you can use a completely normal ingredient in is not a good question, because there are tons and tons of answers, and it just becomes a poll. The asafoetida question definitely fit that criterion; it should be obvious from the question, but you can also see from the answers that you eventually ended up with people just chiming in with their one suggestion of a dish it works in.

Your new question is kind of straddling the line. It sounds like you're actually trying to ask "how are green and white onions different from red, and why might I substitute one for the other" - and that's a fairly reasonable question, though it's odd that you left out yellow onions, and that you grouped two fairly different things together. But one can enumerate the differences, as SAJ14SAJ has done, and provide a real answer. That said, the title is really bad - just asking what you can use X in is exactly the kind of question we want to close. There's some text in the question mirroring this. I would encourage you to edit it, and if you don't, I will at some point. Titles are really important (sometimes people just read the title and skim the question), so if the title reads like a poll, you're going to get poll-style answers.