Phoebe | Spring Day Food (Part 1)
Xiao Jing said that the picking group was going to hold a wild vegetable gathering. I heard that everyone would pick all kinds of wild vegetables and bring them back. It was great that they would bring the nettles that I had always wanted to try. I was tempted and applied to join. (Note: The wild vegetables marked in English in brackets are also ingredients that can be used as both medicine and food in the West.)
I grew up in the suburbs of Yongkang, a small city in Zhejiang. Looking back on my history of picking wild vegetables, I don’t have much experience: I picked Artemisia selengensis to make green rice balls, and I also picked shepherd’s purse, scallion (wild onion), and water spinach. I still remember the spring of my senior year in high school. Facing the pressure of going to college, my deskmate Tao and I spent an afternoon picking wild vegetables in the fields near my home to relax. I love the spring-only fried vermicelli with astragalus and pork. I picked astragalus leaves with my mother and sister. It seems that there is nothing else.
I know purslane and have eaten it, but I have never picked it. I have eaten mulberry leaf pancakes made by my mother at home. The young mulberry leaves were bought. I have also made sedge pancakes at home. How can wild vegetable pancakes be bad? ! In the winter of 2018, I lived in a farmer's house in Zhaojiatai Village, Tanzhe Temple Town, Beijing for 10 days. I ate with the landlord every day and had mulberry leaf vegetarian pancakes made by the landlord. I added some garlic to enhance the flavor. It was delicious! I am a pancake lover, haha. BTW, in Japanese, "野菜" means vegetables, and "山菜" means wild vegetables:)
After starting the nature notes /mini nature observation activities of Cangshan Hiking Home, I learned about many edible wild plants, but I haven’t tasted most of them myself. So, this wild vegetable conference is of special significance to me, hehe.
When I arrived that afternoon, Xiaojing was drawing on the whiteboard at home. 
She sighed and said it was a pity that there was no green pen. She handed me two pens and asked me to draw something. I added a few wild vegetables that fit the theme.
The title of the small picture was "Spring is here, it's time to eat wild vegetables." The little people flying in the air are so cute, I said. The next day, I read the diary posted by Xiaojing. It turned out that the picture was of herself lying on the ground, haha. Xiaojing is very good at free expression and draws some quirky little pictures.
There were some new gadgets in the room that she had been tinkering with recently. They were pretty cool! I praised them one by one with close-up shots. 
Then we went downstairs and picked wild vegetables from the fields.
The equipment Xiao Jing sent me. The small bamboo basket seems to be given to children in the mini mushroom picking activity. 
Xiao Jing squatted beside a potato field and started digging shepherd's purse. She planned to make shepherd's purse meatballs. I followed her and started digging.
The ridges of the fields are full of shepherd's purse. The flowering and fruiting shepherd's purse is very easy to identify. They have typical cruciform small white flowers and lovely heart-shaped short pods. This is what it looks like when you zoom in. Do you recognize it?
Once you recognize the flowering and fruiting shepherd's purse, it is easy to find its young plants nearby. The saying "Shepherd's purse grows in large numbers, so it is called shepherd's purse" means that it grows in large patches, so it is called this name. We dig out the fresh and tender shepherd's purse before it blooms and bears fruit and take it home to eat. After picking it for a while, you will get a feel for the shape of the leaves of shepherd's purse.
Xiao Jing found a piece of Amaranthus (Aster genus), she said it was not easy to find, and asked me if I wanted it. Of course I said yes, as I am greedy, we eat Amaranthus mixed with dried tofu. I haven't eaten it for a long time!
I haven't tried wild spinach yet, I said. Why don't I pick some and try it? Xiao Jing said as he pulled off a few leaves. I followed suit and picked a few leaves.
But when I went home to identify the photo, I searched on WeChat and found that it was a close relative of sorrel (Rumex genus, Polygonaceae) - Rumex serrata. When there are no flowers and fruits, it is a bit difficult to distinguish between sorrel and Rumex serrata. The only difference is the shape of the leaves, but the young leaves of both are edible. Like spinach, they contain more oxalic acid and are not suitable for raw consumption.
The above picture is from the appendix of the book "Introduction to Natural Observation" (Japanese) by Isamu Hinura. The difference between sheep's foot and sorrel is clear at a glance in the search table.
I found a bunch of quinoa, no, quinoa. The leaves of quinoa are longer and thinner than those of quinoa, and the two are close relatives of the genus Chenopodiaceae in the Amaranthaceae family. Wang Wei wrote about quinoa in his poem, "The rain has accumulated and the smoke from the empty forest is slow. I steam quinoa and cook millet to feed the eastern field." I also want to try this ancient wild vegetable, so I put it in my little basket. 
When picking wild vegetables, I saw a few midges flying around. This flying insect becomes active in March every year, so it is commonly known as March fly in English. 
The larvae of the hairy mosquito gather in the shallow layer of the ground, eating rotten plants or plant roots, and the adults visit flowers. They can be seen until late autumn. When I went to Qingbi Creek in early November last year, they were everywhere. Here is a close-up photo I took at that time, which shows it more clearly. 
As can be seen from the photo, the hairy midge is a Diptera insect with only one pair of front wings, and the hind wings have degenerated into a pair of balance bars (those two pin-like things). Most insects have two pairs of wings, so those with one pair of wings are specially picked out to form a separate order of Diptera. The Diptera order includes flies, mosquitoes, gnats (ruì), midges (měng), and horseflies (méng).
At this time, there are some clever swallows flying in the sky, and a black-winged kite hovering to hunt. The black-winged kite is the only raptor in the top 10 common birds in Dali (by Natural Spirit Ecological Photography Studio). From my observations so far, it seems that the buzzard is more common, so why is it not on the list? The Chinese Bird Watching Assistant introduced the black-winged kite as "the only white eagle that flutters its feathers and hovers in the air to look for prey." The black-winged kite is beautiful and has a highly recognizable appearance: white feathers, dotted with a few black patches, red eyes and yellow feet.
Most of the land in Shangyangbo seems to be contracted by agricultural companies, and uniform crops such as lettuce are planted there. According to the information Xiaojing gave me, I came to a small irrigation ditch. Xiaojing said that the gray-gray vegetables here are larger, and they are indeed larger, but most of them have flower buds or have already bloomed. I picked a wave selectively. The common name "gray-gray vegetables" includes several similar species such as quinoa and small quinoa.
The small quinoa I saw by the water is still a small quinoa, with very small flowers, typical wind-pollinated flowers. If you zoom in on the photo I took, you can see that it has five green tepals (the sepals and petals are combined into one), two white filamentous stigmas showing the low-key presence of the pistil, and even more eye-catching are the pale yellow anthers of the stamens.
I searched online and found that the popular health food quinoa (pronounced "keen wa") in recent years is a close relative of quinoa and Chenopodium album. Its flowers and leaves look quite similar to the above picture. We eat its seeds. In ancient China, quinoa soup made from quinoa seeds was a coarse food for ordinary people. Confucius also ate it when he was in danger. (BTW, quinoa soup, Han Dian explains it as a soup made from quinoa. Although this view is the mainstream on the Internet, I support the view of the species calendar on Guokr.com.)
An old man came towards us. Xiao Jing greeted him and showed him the wild vegetables in his backpack. The old man nodded and smiled. In the spring fields, the word "wild vegetables" is a social password. Anyone who gives the password automatically joins the "Wild Vegetables Club", and when they meet, they smile knowingly. Picking wild vegetables is a serious matter.
I saw a cruciferous plant with yellow flowers by the water. I thought it was edible, so I decided to pick some and take them back to try. 
I went home and looked it up. This is the marsh shepherd's purse (Cruciferae). The name suggests that it grows near water and is edible. I looked it up again and it is indeed edible. It is called "water shepherd's purse".
There is another plant near the water that I don’t recognize. It looks like this: 
I searched at home and found that this is Veronica officinalis (Vonilla genus, Plantaginaceae). If you look closely at the flower, it is indeed somewhat similar to Veronica officinalis. The young leaves are edible! It is called "water spinach".
Xiao Jing had picked enough and asked me to go back with him. I agreed and pulled up a bunch of Cardamine, which was also the variety I wanted to try. The cross-shaped flowers of Cardamine are larger than those of Shepherd's Purse, and the fruit is a slender silique. The pinnate compound leaves are obviously different from the simple leaves of Shepherd's Purse. Cardamine can be eaten as a wild vegetable just like Shepherd's Purse.
When we got home, we first counted the species we collected in a dustpan: quinoa, ground lettuce, amaranth, wormwood, wild buckwheat, water celery, shepherd's purse, cardamine, wild pea, chickweed, marsh leeks, sheep's feet, and wild sunflower. Hehe, a total of thirteen species. 
Yan Zi 's dog showed up at two o'clock, and then Yan Zi showed up with a backpack full of bags. She looked at the dishes we ordered and said, "You are just playing house." I laughed. When I first started working, my mother came to Shanghai and made the same comment when the kitchenware I bought didn't suit her.
Yan Zi was generous and capable. She brought two roast ducks, fried wild vegetable pancakes, and prepared a big pot of cured pork ribs and chicken soup as the base for the hot pot. Yan Zi picked a lot of wild vegetables, which were good and clean, mainly chickweed, water celery, wild peas and bracken, as well as cleavers. Cleavers were put aside because she hadn't figured out how to eat them.
Having written this far, I searched and watched a video. In the video, Mr. Wang simply boiled the Lala vine with some oil and salt. He said it tasted similar to wild peas, but because the stems and leaves of the Lala vine had thorns, the texture was a bit rough. By the way, its English name also comes from its characteristic of being a bit cleave on your hand. So, just put it in the hot pot.
I wrote about cleavers in a dictionary class for rice tea five years ago (the picture above was taken near my home in Yongkang at that time). The last sentence reads: "Clavers is almost a citizen of the world. It can be found all over the world. Both the East and the West recognize its medicinal value. Westerners also dry and chop it up to make herbal tea, which is called cleavers tea." At that time, the accepted name of cleavers (Rubiaceae) was still cleavers, but now cleavers have become a synonym.
It is said that cleavers tea can prevent kidney stones, reduce urinary tract infections, improve the immune system... a lot of benefits. When writing this article, I also saw a simple recipe for making tea with fresh cleavers: wash 5-10 pieces of fresh cleavers, pour them into 100ml of boiling water and soak for 5-10 minutes, filter out the leaves, add honey or sugar, and if you like, you can add some lemon juice, and a cup of herbal tea is ready. I tried it, and the results of my attempt will be analyzed next time: P
Yan Zi saw the wild peas with flowers that I picked and told me that the leaves of the wild peas that are in bloom are poisonous, but the flowers are edible, so I should remember to pick the young leaves that have not yet bloomed. I went home and searched and found an article in The Paper that mentioned that "after the wild peas bloom, the content of toxic substances such as β-cyanoalanine in the plant will increase, and the toxicity will be even stronger after the seeds are formed. At this time, the stems and leaves should never be eaten." Yan Zi is indeed a lover of watching wilderness survival videos.
Soon after Yan Zi arrived, Yang Mi appeared with Xiao Xi. She held a bunch of winter jasmine flowers, carried a backpack and a basket, and carried large and small bags like Yan Zi. She brought Buddleja and small dumplings, saying that she would cook Buddleja dumplings for everyone, as well as delicious white strawberries, a basket of southern alfalfa (golden cauliflower) and walnut flowers, as well as some shepherd's purse with roots and some mint that she picked. Yang Mi said that her family said that shepherd's purse is better to be cooked with the roots.
I described to Xiao Jing how Shanghainese people stir-fry golden cauliflower with white wine, which is so fragrant! Yang Mi was going to coat them with flour and steam them. This is a popular "steamed dish" in her hometown of Henan - steamed vegetarian dishes.
The reason why southern alfalfa is commonly known as "golden flower vegetable" is because it blooms small bright yellow flowers. Since there is southern alfalfa, is there northern alfalfa? Alfalfa (Chinese correct name) which is more common in northern China is relatively large in size and is an alien species. It blooms purple flowers and has slender trifoliate leaflets. The small southern alfalfa is a native species of China, and its leaf shape is between alfalfa and oxalis. I compared the two in "House Hunting Notes (V)". Here is an old picture used in that article for easy comparison.
The walnut flowers Yang Mi collected are the male inflorescences of walnuts, and the flowers on them are still buds. I have seen walnut flowers sold on Taobao before. After the male flowers are pollinated, the flowers are removed and the inflorescence axis in the middle is eaten, which is then dried and sold as dried goods.
Last spring, I photographed red-bellied squirrels eating walnuts in Peach Creek Valley.
Of course, the little squirrels can't let go of the walnut blossoms. I also photographed squirrels eating walnut blossoms, but they seemed to only eat the tender buds, like gnawing on corn cobs, leaving the middle flower axis.
Cheng Chang asked AI to help me make this photo vertical, with the squirrel in the center. I was surprised and wondered how did Mr. Chang do it? Later, that picture became my event poster, haha.
Xiao Jing said, Xiao Qi is here. Everyone leaned over the railing and looked down. (To be continued)
Related reading: "Spring | Wild Vegetable Guide" by Xiao Jing
