Yan Cai and Other Veggies

During this time of year, all the leafy veggies are looking really good. Maybe part of it is due to the everyday care and work the students put into it. They plow and soften the soil, take out bugs by hand, burn old shrubs and add its ash to the soil, and constantly water and fertilize (with our very own fermented poop!). The agriculture methods may be more primitive here but they all grow healthy, big, and no one gets sick.


I still love watching how much the kids eat here. After washing their hands and lining up orderly, they get big amounts of food and eat it all! I can't believe how much they are able to eat. They sometimes even get up to get seconds if there is enough food. They also eat everything that is served to them and are not picky whatsoever. When I was a kid, I know a lot of American kids like me that didn’t touch anything that was green unless forced to by parents. But they eat everything including all the delicious vegetables we grow.




Today, we harvested a type of Chinese long stem green leaf vegetable, which will later be processed into what they call here Yan Cai. This vegetable is not eaten fresh, but preserved through drying and salting. After using an actual cleaver from the kitchen to cut the roots off, we gathered them in baskets and then laid all of them out on flat concrete to dry over night. The students then transferred all of them to some railings and will hang them there until they are dry enough. After a few days, they can begin cutting the vegetables up and adding salt and other spices to begin preserving. It takes about a month before you can start cooking with it, during which the flavor will intensify. According to the lovely cooks here, it's supposedly especially tasty stir fried with some pork. Too bad I have to wait another month until I can try it though!