Gotu kola appears in the meals of the countryside as a familiar dish, meeting all 3 factors of delicious, nutritious, cheap. Well, not cheap but free, just takes a little effort to pick. Like my family back then, gotu kola did not have to go to the market to buy, my mother went to work in the field, saw a patch of gotu kola on the edge of the field, she sat down to pick it and in the afternoon she would have a bowl of sweet and aromatic vegetable soup. My daughters saw that and followed suit, every time they went to the field to plant seedlings or crossed the river to herd cows, pick beans, whenever they saw gotu kola, they would pick it and bring it home.
Gotu kola appears in the meals of the countryside as a familiar dish, meeting all 3 factors: delicious, nutritious, and cheap (Illustration photo from the Internet)
Because our family was poor, my mother often cooked pennywort soup. The best was pennywort soup with shrimp. The golden cooked shrimp mixed in the fresh green leaves, dense, reduced the bitterness and increased the sweetness of the vegetable. If there was no shrimp, it could be replaced with lean meat. If it was a vegetarian day, my mother would cook pennywort soup with mushrooms, this dish was also very delicious. Especially, on hot sunny afternoons, a bowl of pennywort soup would cool down the hot summer days. Pennywort soup was delicious and light. After a tiring day working under the sun, the whole family almost neglected rice, but they drank pennywort soup. My father said pennywort soup was simple but delicious, just seeing it made you feel cool inside. Yes, pennywort is really cool. At that time, there wasn't much information about the uses of vegetables like now to look up, but through folk experience, everyone in the countryside knew that pennywort was cold, helped purify the body, aided digestion, and improved physical strength. To maximize the beneficial effects of pennywort, meals often have this vegetable dish to change the taste, you can eat pennywort raw, boiled or pureed to drink. Pennywort juice is an extremely effective heat-relieving dish. Just pennywort juice, with sugar and a little ice, will make the summer afternoon less harsh. Back then, the house did not have a blender, pure white sugar and pure ice cubes like today. Pick pennywort, wash it, put it in a mortar and pound it, filter out the pulp, then add sugar (homemade brown sugar), add ice cubes and you have a large thermos of delicious, nutritious drink. Because the vegetable is pounded by hand, the water has a bitter smell but that's okay, it's still the best, you can drink it and still crave it. Since I was little, I wondered if the name " pennywort ", "ma" here had anything to do with the image of a hard-working mother? When I grew up, I explained to myself that the name was arbitrary, baseless, unreasonable, sometimes even arbitrary, so it was difficult to explain. Just knowing that pennywort grows in every countryside, every time hearing the name, in everyone's heart appears the image of a hard-working mother.
Comment (0)