The lettuce that you can't eat is pickled, dried in the sun, put into a bottle or jar, and when you want to eat it, cut it into small pieces, fry it or not, drop a few drops of sesame oil, dip it in some hot sauce, and bite it in your mouth with a crispy rattle. I drank japonica rice porridge, and I didn't pay attention to it, so I sucked two bowls and ate it.

Don't look at the big body of the lettuce, but there are not many roots under the feet to pull and stumble to survive, and they get up after a little pulling. Lettuce mainly relies on wide leaves for photosynthesis to absorb nutrients, if the leaves are too dense and impermeable, in the warm spring weather of the humid and hot earth, the roots can not withstand the drying, often wet and rotten bald pile, although the leaves that bear the sun at the top are still growing wildly, but lightly touched, they will fall down softly.

In early summer, the stems of lettuce gradually elongate and swell, and the top of the leaves grows capitate inflorescences, the flowers are yellow, fruit brown or silvery-white, and the crown hairs are covered with them, which can be gently blown like dandelions and float into the uncertain distance, full of fragrant poetry.

Lettuce is a foreign dish, I don't know if it immigrated before the Tang Dynasty, anyway, Du Fu is very greedy to eat lettuce, when he was poor and trapped in Kuizhou, he couldn't afford to buy the high-priced lettuce that was very fashionable in the market, so he was full of hope to sow seeds on the ground, but only wild amaranth was all over the ground, and the delicious green vegetables that he thought about did not grow, so he wrote a poem "Planting Lettuce" to vent his grief and anger.

However, Lao Du is far better than the pregnant woman in the Western fairy tale, the woman saw the lettuce leaves in the people's home through the wall and was tempting, and her mouth was really greedy, and her husband jumped over the wall in desperation to steal it for her to eat, which made a big mistake - the lettuce was a witch's, and she was coerced, and the child was born separated from the flesh and bones, and was taken away by the witch.

The native lettuce in the West is the kind of lettuce that eats leaves. The name lettuce, which brings out the authentic Jiangnan flavor, also makes me more likely to recall the past rural years. Come to think of it, what the big-bellied woman in the Western fairy tale is only hungry for is the green leaves, and she may not know how to eat stems and many flavors beyond eating stems.

Dai Wangshu, who wrote "Rain Alley", has a background in staying abroad, so he calls lettuce lettuce, and there are two sentences in his poetry collection: Because the body of a small illness is weak in the wind of light spring / and I am fascinated by lettuce in the sun of my home.

Every time I walk to other people's vegetable fields or see other people's vegetable fields, two lines of poetry of the ancients always come out of my mind: a few rows of vegetables do not make a row, and the white leeks are green and easy to taste. However, in early summer, the eggplant, peppers, cowpeas, and green beans in the field have only grown seedlings and vines, and pumpkins have only bloomed yellow flowers one after another.

In particular, the amaranth, whether it is planted in the gap under the gourd rack, or presented in the ground in a new way, always looks so pleasant and friendly. In the vegetable garden where the rain has passed through the clouds, the amaranth washed by the rain, the tips of the young leaves are dotted with water droplets, and there is a kind of affectionate fresh stretch, which makes people's souls stagnate.

Amaranth do not need oil, just knead three handfuls. When washing amaranth, be sure to knead the foam and float it away. Drain the water, boil the pot a little hotter, put more oil, this is what Zhang Ailing said, put a few garlic cloves and stir-fry, pour in the amaranth and stir-fry with a stinging sound.

The kind of amaranth with deep red veins and thick dark purple leaves is like knocking over a paint jar when scrubbed, and can dye several large basins of water red. This kind of amaranth should be fried a little well, until the white garlic cloves also turn crimson, and when it is sandwiched into the bowl, the edges of the white rice and white porcelain bowl will be dyed with a bewitching rouge.

In the past, the paint that could not be separated from the pastry workshop was called amaranth red, and the touching red on the Huantuan and steamed bun cakes that I had eaten in the rural years when I was a child came from this. The best thing to eat is the kind of green amaranth with fine leaves, slightly rubbed and washed, drained water, and slightly fried with crushed garlic, its fragrance is fresh and tender with the freshness of early summer left between the teeth and tongue.

Zheng Banqiao's paintings are exquisite, and the words and sentences of many inscription poems are also wonderful. I remember that he has two poems, cabbage, green salt, amaranth rice, clay pot, Tianshui chrysanthemum tea, taste and color, all of which can be combined at will. The amaranth rice has a crimson face, and the salt that belongs to the era is slightly green, indicating that it contains many impurities, and the clay pot boils rainwater to brew chrysanthemum tea, which is the most so-called secular ecology. Peaceful tea and rice, color and thought, under the taste, there is a kind of peaceful country life, which is very desirable.

Reading the essays of the old man in Zhitang, there is an amaranth stalk: Recently, the villagers disposed of pickled amaranth stalks to eat, and there seems to be a sense of old rain for amaranth. It is said that the kind of amaranth stalks that are too old to smoke the stems like human lengths, cut into sections and salted, soaked in stinky brine, and wait for fermentation to become ready, both raw and cooked can be eaten, and it is especially good to eat porridge at night in summer.

When eating, suck out the jelly-like tender liquid in the rhizome, and then spit out the uneaten skin, which is about the same as when we suck jelly now. In our case, there are old amaranth trees that grow to human height and bear clusters of seeds under the leaves, but they are raised and planted, and one or two stand alone on the ground.

The rest are in season, and those that should be pulled out are scattered, and the amaranth is old and will not be left. Although we also eat amaranth stalks here, there is another way to eat them. It was already the middle of summer, the green stalks of amaranth were torn off the skin, pinched into inch segments, too thick and too plump to be cut from the middle, and then fried with green pepper shreds, but also very fresh and pleasant.

I have eaten a kind of steamed amaranth, which is a pot of boiled eating method when there is a lack of food and less burning in the early years: after the rice pot is dry, spread the amaranth, and continue two fires in the stove to bring up the heat, and the cooked vegetables are good. Take a pair of chopsticks from the hot rice pot head to swipe the steamed amaranth into a bowl, add garlic and salt, and then pour a few drops of cooked sesame oil, the taste in the mouth is also reasonable, but the pot of rice with mountain dew is full of peach blossom color, just like overturning the paint jar, that is really there to see.

When visiting Huizhou, I also ate steamed amaranth with rice noodles, put fried rice noodles into the amaranth, add fresh soup, salt, chicken essence, oil, mix well, and quickly steam with boiling water. Amaranth is fresh and tender, not soft and rotten, the color is ruddy, the taste is fragrant and glutinous, salty and fresh. Huizhou used to go to Wuyuan, and there was another way to eat, that is, to make spring rolls with amaranth, or the "amaranth zygote" they shouted, the taste is not evil.

What is unpleasant is that in many restaurants in the city at present, all green vegetables are poured heavy oil in the pot first, and they are tired of eating without saying, and the original Qingming taste of vegetables is also rudely "pulled" to be lost, which is a typical commercial vulgar style.

Amaranth is endemic to the south of the Yangtze River and rarely seen in the north. It's the kind of amaranth with round shield-shaped big leaves, and the whole handful is pierced and sold, and there is no red and green water spirit at all. Ironically, in the menu book of a restaurant next to Liulichang, I saw amaranth in soup, and I wanted to see what the method was, so I ordered this dish.

If you follow the rules, the dishes served in the soup are all made of broth, that is, they are slightly fried first, then simmered with broth, put into a bowl, and sometimes a little sea rice, black fungus or something is added. But when the amaranth in the soup we want is served, it looks like it's just fried amaranth......

It was as if following a beautiful and graceful name, but it was an unsightly vulgar woman, and the amaranth was obviously a little old, and it was rough and rough in the mouth to pull the tongue. In the end, the water and soil in the north are not as soft and gentle as those in the south.

The famous "quinoa" that grows vividly in the "Book of Songs" is a kind of wild amaranth, and the public shouts that it is gray gray cabbage or gray amaranth, which grows wantonly in front of the house and behind the house and on the edge of the ditch.

The seedlings and tender stems and leaves of gray amaranth are blanched in water, and then rinsed with water to remove the astringency, which can be fried or cold or made into soup, which is delicious and tender. People with a lot of stomach acid are especially suitable for eating gray amaranth, gray amaranth is alkaline, and the water that has fried gray amaranth is very refreshing to wash dishes.

Purslane also bears the name of "amaranth", but it is far from the same, but the sun-dried purslane and pork belly are burned together with the flavor, and under the blowing of the wind in the summer summer, it is used for rice, which is very emotional.