Hot pot with home-grown greens

On Saturdays, my wife and I usually do quite a bit of work on our patch. Not this week. We arrived at our garden late, around midday, and hardly got any 'work' done. It was an exciting day: we were going to have lunch with our two lovely friends, a couple living nearby who, like us, are relative newbies at the community garden.

hot pot filled with our veggies, tofu, and enoki mushrooms 

komatsuna growing
well too

mibuna getting really
dense on our patch

Being so late to arrive at our patch, we madly harvested our leafy greens: mibuna, komatsuna, lettuce, bok choi, as well as some radish. Mibuna is a thin, long Japanese green that tastes a bit like the Chinese bok choi. Komatsuna leaves are a bit wider, and less dark in colour. I can't really distinguish between their taste right now, rather I differentiate them by the shape of their stalks and leaves. They're all quite similar to me in taste, but not appearance.

veggies all cleaned and ready to cook

our greens: kale (from our friends),
mibuna (long, on the right), and
komatsuna (another Japanese green)

It took about one hour to prepare the meal, and we were all really hungry by then (around 1:30pm). I was so hungry that as I waited for the ingredients to cook on the stove, I managed to unconsciously pick up (with my chopsticks) a large piece of bok choi leaf in front of me, and bite right into it. It took a few seconds for me to notice it was cold, hard, and kind of bitter and ... uncooked! Haha! It actually tasted okay, but it's still better to soak it in a good stock and cook it slightly before eating ;)

stock alone with sliced radishes,
which is actually our green manure!

The stock sauces were made by Yokpok. Two compartments each with a slightly different taste (one was mostly soy, the other was miso). We each got a golden 'net' to 'fish' out our food. Apart from the tofu and enoki, we had protein in the form of raw egg (only the boys were daring enough to use it as a dipping sauce) and thin cuts of lamb and beef. And oh yes, I almost forgot we had 'noodles' in this hot pot too (konyaku, which is not strictly a noodle).

prickly pears are filled with
seeds, but can be surprisingly sweet

After our massive lunch, I got to try prickly pear for the first time. They're the fruit from cacti plants that have invade the perimeter of our community garden. I didn't know anything could be edible from them. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that the fruit was so colourful (once you carefully remove all spikes and the outer layer). Some of them are really sweet and nice, but others are less flavourful. The colours don't seem to suggest the sweetness of the fruit. My jaws got a bit tired out from all the 'chewing', that is, carefully biting into the flesh but not into the seeds, which are hard and have to be swallowed whole.

What a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon... two couples enjoying a hot pot filled mostly with produce that we grew together in our community garden over the last six months. It's the satisfying feeling of growing your own stuff and eating it super-fresh—within hours of harvesting it. It's at times like this, when I eat food that I've grown, that I feel proud to be alive, to be human.

Thank you for inviting us over and sharing your food with us. :) We look forward to catching up again soon.