From January to April and may, there are many stalls selling gardenias in Nanchang's vegetable market - not for viewing, but for drinking. The edible gardenias are brown and have a special fragrance. The method is to heat the oil, add minced garlic and a little dry red pepper, stir fry until fragrant, pour in Gardenia, add leeks and stir fry slightly, and then the seasoning can be out of the pot.
Gardenia has grown from a snack to a big one. I always buy Gardenia several times every spring when it comes to the market. It is said that it can clear away heat and cool blood, calm the liver and brighten the eyes, but I just go for the taste, and the "effect" doesn't matter. After eating Gardenia fried leeks, it seems that this spring is complete.
When grandma was alive, she would pick hibiscus flowers for soup. There are many such flowers in Jiangnan. It is best to pick them in the courtyard. People on the roadside are afraid of dust and tail gas pollution. Hibiscus flowers usually have multiple bracts. Picking a few flowers can promote the development of other bracts. Float and soak in salt water for a while, remove the flower stems and flower cores, and then make egg soup. Add some pepper and sesame oil before cooking. Hibiscus flowers have other practices, such as spreading egg cakes.
Grandma knows how to eat and use many plants for medicine. When she was alive, I didn't pay attention to recording demerits. In addition to knowing that Hibiscus can be eaten, I also knew that the fried water of hibiscus flowers can diminish inflammation and detoxify. As soon as I had a fever or inflammation in my childhood, my mother immediately used the stored dried hibiscus flowers to fry the water. The fried juice was amber, and a spoonful of sugar was added. It was much better than medicine.
After grandma's death, the use of the numerous plants went with her to another world. Fortunately, there are still many people who are familiar with folk plants, such as grandma.
One July, I spent a week in Beidaihe. I lived near the sea and walked for more than ten minutes. The road was lined with luxuriant northern plants. A stern looking old woman was picking leaves by the roadside with her bow back. I asked curiously. She told me that it was mulberry leaves. Boiling water could cure diabetes, reduce blood pressure and cure eye diseases. "Look how long this leaf can grow. I picked it the day before yesterday. It has grown so high again!" The old lady pointed to the plastic bag and told me that the mulberry leaves were collected for my wife to drink. Back to check, "mulberry is also known as mulberry, wattle mulberry, mulberry tree, etc. stir fry mulberry leaves gently until they are dark yellow, take them out and air them for medicine". Lishizhen also wrote in the compendium of materia medica: "mulberry leaves are the medicine of hand and Foot Yangming. The decoction can replace the tea and stop thirst."
One spring, I took my son Huhu to the park near my home. There is a "garden in the garden" in the park, with quiet scenery and flowers and trees in full bloom. Under the pine tree, an old man was picking a plant with small yellow flowers. He was curious about everything. The old man replied that he picked "Grandma Ding". After boiling the water, it can be used as cold soup or soup. He also gave us an empty plastic bag to pick some. After returning home, I found that "Grandma Ding" was originally dandelion, which could be used as medicine or eaten. There are various ways to eat, such as dipping raw food in sauce, or adding scallions to scramble eggs, adding boiled dandelion to meat stuffing and making dumplings. It is also very delicious.
On another occasion, in this park, an old couple picked a plant, and the answer was wormwood leaf, which was used to wrap wormwood. They patiently told me how to do it: wash and chop the Wormwood Leaves, cook them together with a small amount of edible soda, then knead them into glutinous rice flour to form a dough, and steam them in a cage to make Wormwood Leaves. My girlfriend, y, always picks Wormwood Leaves to make tomb sweeping day dumplings in spring. Most of them are filled with salty stuffing. There is a kind of diced preserved meat and bamboo shoots. It's really warm. In spring, she also led her daughter to pick shepherd's purse, ash and Malan head. Later, near the Dragon Boat Festival, she went to the mountains in the suburbs to pick reed leaves and wrap zongzi. She learned from the countryside that when she was a child, she worked hard to study so that she could eat fish instead of wild vegetables. Now she doesn't want to eat fish. Instead, she thinks about the taste of wild vegetables.
Every year, near may, the family will raise several pots of jasmine. I raised more than a dozen pots on the roof of the building for a long time last year. Since then, they have fallen on the ground and blossomed. It's really "fragrant and beautiful, full of branches, fragrant and praised by white people". I took off the tea and made it, poured it into boiling water, and covered a cup to cool it. This is not the case with exquisite jasmine tea. There is a section named "Jasmine" in the "keeping a small record" written by Gu Zhong of the Qing Dynasty. "Thick white honey is painted on the center of the bowl, and it is not allowed to be hung next to it. Every morning and evening, pick jasmine and put it in another bowl. Cover the honey bowl. Take a bowl at noon and pour it into the soup, which is very fragrant." It means that white honey (the color is white, and the source of honey is mostly Sophora japonica or Linden flower, which is a good product of light colored honey) is thickly coated in the center of the bowl, and then another bowl is used to hold Jasmine under the honey bowl, and the two bowls are covered for half a day. Jasmine and honey are flushed together, and the clear fragrance is mixed with the sweetness of the honey. Its taste is especially good.
Jasmine is probably the most representative plant of oriental charm. It is light and implicit. Du ang, a Ming Dynasty man, said in San Yu Fu Bi that "Zeng duanbo took jasmine as his elegant friend and Uncle Zhang Min took jasmine as a distant guest." Who is Zeng duanbo? He was a poet of the Song Dynasty and named "ten friends in flowers". Who is Uncle Zhang Min? Again, the famous painting "Twelve guests" was painted by the doctors, painters, and poets of the song rites department. The twelve flowers are used to describe the twelve guests, and their poems are given respectively.
Nowadays, there aren't as many men who love flowers and plants as before? Not necessarily. Wenyou hanyusheng, a Northwest man who grew up in a small city in Gansu, has a soft feeling of being fascinated by flowers and plants. Shortly before the Spring Festival, I received two botanical books written by him. They are both beautiful in text and pictures. The first book is a record of plants in the northwest, which contains not only the plants in his hometown, but also the wandering, searching and reflection of life dormant in the plants. The other book, the soul of plants and trees in the bookofsongs, is one of the three volume series, which interprets more than 130 kinds of plants in the bookofsongs. If you don't have enough love for plants, how can you write again and again affectionately to make it a quiet and warm album? His microblog is also mostly about plants, from plants in the vegetable market and ridges to exotic flowers and plants, with pictures and texts, "I take this Magnolia every year, just like the password of time and the singing voice of Zhongchun, which gives me some proof of the meaning of the passing of my life." This is his latest micro blog.
No matter what troubles the world, only plants and trees will last forever.
I really hope that he will publish another book devoted to plants and food to talk about how gardenia, hibiscus, dandelion, Wormwood Leaves, etc. enter the food, and how cypress leaves, osmanthus and jasmine make a "fragrant" tea in a classical way. (chenweiwen)
