Flavor of Spring! Yummy Wild Vegetable Heaven

Noboribetsu local mountains become a gigantic fresh market for FREE! at the moment. The amount of mountain vegetables (we call them "san sai") we can catch is just far too much to keep them to ourselves. I am not exaggerating! We can feed the world. It's a wonderland for adult who love the nature.

Other than bamboo shoots, watercress, Japanese parsley, probably other mountain vegis are exclusive to Hokkaido. And the amount we can catch is far too much more we can consume ourselves.

.....bamboos just picked from the local mountain. yum!

When Sakura (cherry blossoms) is over its best, locals get itchy feet to go into mountains and pick mountain vegetables (we call them "san sai"). This is almost addictive! Everybody go nuts about picking as many as they can. And even though it is such a hard work, without any hesitation they give away many of their catches to friends, family, and neighbors.

I very much enjoy all the vegetables from the local mountains. They are all beautiful to look at and have strong unique flavor that you can never taste from the farmed vegetables. Truly blessings of nature!

Around this time of the year, no matter if you go to mountains yourself or not, your fridge is filled with tons of different kinds of "flavor of Spring". This makes me realise that us, human being had started our society with "sharing" to survive together. And this time Noboribetsu locals seem to return to where we should be and I feel fortunate to be here!