Mountain Vegetables

The late spring is the best season for mountain vegetables in Japan. You can find so many different kinds of vegetables after the snow has melted, and people can more easily hike into the more remote mountain areas to pick the wild vegetables.

This morning, my aunt and our neighbor went to pick a variety called 'zenmai', and they brought back a lot of them. This mountain vegetable, 'zenmai' has a few steps before we can eat it. You can't eat it fresh -- since it has to be dried in the sun first. Then you have to boil it before eating.

My aunt started drying 'zenmai' early this afternoon in front of our house on a woven mat. You can see this kind of view -- people rolling vegetables by hand out in the sun -- all over the place in our neighborhood this time of year.

Here are some pictures I took at my neighbor's house. You can see the steps how this vegetable is dried:

This is the first day. You have to boil it first (very quickly) before you start dry zenmai. Just like above, and you start rolling small bunches of zenmai with your hand -- it is very soft at this point.

You roll it every 30 minute or so, and in a few days it will be like this:
When it gets dry, you have to roll it hard.
Within about three days, zenmai will be like this:
It looks very dry, doesn't it! We keep this vegetable dry in a box, and eat it little by little until next spring -- it is a good food for winter time.
And when we eat, it has to be boiled again (quite long time) and then we often mix it with other vegetables.
It's very tasty (^o^)

While my aunt is working on  drying the zenmai, Luke and my Mom was working in the vegetable garden.

This year we are going to plant tomato, cucumber, eggplant, and okra. Luke is very interested to watch every step. He has to do the exact same thing that my mom is doing. Hopefully Luke can see those vegetable grow, and even eat some, before we go back to North Carolina in the late summer.