Wild vegetables from my hometown
Text/Li Yuna
In my memory, when I was a teenager, I began to dig wild vegetables in the countryside from spring.
The first digging is the cabbage that grows on the depressions, rice fields, and dams, and the cabbage can be dug out with its snow white and tender roots, which can be blanched with water, dipped in sauce, wrapped in cabbage stuffed buns, or mixed with cornmeal to cook cakes. In fact, after entering the city, I wrapped dumplings with cabbage in the spring, which was very delicious. Lettuce contains glutamate nutrients. It has cooling blood to stop bleeding, detoxification and antihypertensive effect. The second dish I dug up was the donkey ear root, the scientific name is psyllium, also called the car rudder, which is generally grown by the river and the donkey ear root is large and tender. Psyllium is a Chinese herbal medicine, it has the effect of clearing heat and diuresis, expectorant and cooling blood. My favorite wild vegetable is lettuce. It first sprouts purple hairy buds in the spring, it is root propagation, when digging up lettuce vegetables home to wash raw dipping sauce defeat fire, lettuce vegetables are also called koji. It can be wrapped in vegetables, and when the corn is about to bloom, the corn lettuce grows tall and blooms with yellow flowers, and it is a good feed dish to feed the pigs and chickens back. Sarcastic vegetables are fed to chickens, ducks and pigs. Bitter vegetables are very bad, and now people in Shandong still make bitter vegetables into tea, and bitter vegetables bloom small white flowers and small yellow flowers... There is a movie called "Bitter Cauliflower", in which the mother is described as a bitter cauliflower.
In the spring we dig up the mother-in-law, its scientific name is dandelion, it is a very good medicinal material, it contains a lot of active ingredients, can clear heat and detoxification, reduce swelling and loosen knots, cure mastitis, hepatitis, boils ... It blooms small yellow flowers, and the flower is behind its hollow stem to support a furry seed, pinched down and blown, and its seeds fly everywhere like small umbrellas. In the early years I wrote a poem in memory of an early childhood friend: you are a dandelion / Your suffering is medicine / You dress up the earth of spring / Your seeds of kindness are flying everywhere...
The south of the small village where we live, seven or eight miles is a base beach, we often go to pick alkali pon, the alkali pon grows on the flat alkali ground, and there are no other weeds inside, and the alkali pon is picked back, whether it is blanched with hot water or bun buns, it is very delicious, and the alkali pung vegetables and cornmeal are mixed together to eat the cake is also a unique flavor, and the nutritional components of the alkali poncho are very rich.
It also has medicinal effects, can cure children's night sweats, nocturia, blood detoxification, alkali seed extract oil to produce conjugated linoleic acid with anti-cancer, cholesterol-lowering effect. Because there are few mountains in the hometown chestnut house Fantun, so later I went to the city to know the thorny buds, large leaf parsley, bracken, cat ears, mountain maza on the mountains in the northern mountains...
Wild vegetables are mostly medicinal herbs, and the sprouts are the young shoots of the Eleuthero tree. I am a grassroots person who likes to eat wild vegetables, and the memory of picking wild vegetables when I was a teenager makes me unforgettable. Every spring, I used to think about asking a few friends to dig wild vegetables, but every time this thing did not work. Think of childhood, when I was a teenager, walking through the yang in March and April in the yang spring to gleefully dig up wild vegetables, watching all kinds of beautiful birds flying in front of my eyes, twisting the willow flute and blowing in the field, looking at the distant mountains, fantasizing about where the mountain is, where is the place where there is...
The teenager's heart is like a cloud. Always wanting to go out of the small village of life to see the outside world is the wish of many friends at that time. Many years later I walked out of the village, but what I missed most in middle age was the land where I grew up, the people and things there, the peach and apricot blossoms that bloomed in the spring, the birds that flew in the willow pond in the spring, the mountains went all over the mountains in the spring to dig vegetables, saw a horse snake (lizard) beat it to death, caught a few "god lords and his brother-in-law" (rain frogs) in the tree, and then let it go, it was wet, it indicated that it was about to rain.
When digging wild vegetables, there is a thing called sour ginger, we often dig to eat, sour, there is a kind of willow leaves, the leaves are green and red, we call the duck mouth leaf, can be eaten...
When people reach middle age, I have forgotten many past events in the years, but most of what I can't forget is the difficult juvenile time, perhaps the kind of hardship is full of fun. The land in the countryside is thick, the wild vegetables in the country land once nurtured me, the most simple and rustic things are often the most vital, and in the next life I hope to be a dandelion in the land of my hometown.
About the Author
Li Yuna: Female, Han ethnicity, retired cadre of Zhuanghe City History Office. Graduated from silk design, he loves calligraphy and painting appreciation. He is a member of Dalian Writers Association and Liaoning Essayists Association. In the 1980s, he began to create literature, and his works were scattered in newspapers and magazines at all levels. He is good at writing historical stories and biographies.
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