Purslane, delicious weed.

If you walk into the garden, you will see this kind of weed, this kind of plant everywhere, almost everywhere in the world. They grow well. People call them purslane. They are succulent. They can survive very well in the dry climate. When they grow with less water, they will hurry to flowers and have seeds, but they will never die easily. So they last quite long, the whole season. Farmers or gardeners don't like them because it's hard to get rid of them. Normally they have yellow flowers, very tiny yellow flowers like but only a few days they will have seeds like this, tiny seeds in the small cups. If you check it, it will drop in the ground very fast. This kind of seed is too tiny to see with our eyes. Normally, especially if we don't have a good eyesight, we can't see it at all. So tiny. But whenever it drops in the ground and they have enough moisture, they will sprout very quick, become a tiny plant like this. Then they will grow fast. After they have a few leaves, they grow very, very fast. Normally, people don't like them, but actually this kind of plant is very useful for our garden because they can cover the soil for us. They work like a mulch, but they have very short roots, very tiny roots like this. So they will not take away the food from our vegetables so much, but they grow so big. The leaves and the branches will cover the bed. It will work like a mulching for our garden. It helps to protect the soil, keep the moisture stay longer. So it's good to cover plants in our garden because our vegetables and parsley, they eat food in different levels. So they will not fight for food from each other. So to have parsley in the garden is useful, especially if we grow something high or tall like chilies or eggplant or another tall plant. But one thing that grows close to parsley is spurs. This one, they like to grow together. They are companions by natural way. They love to grow together very well. But the difference is purslane is edible, but spur is not edible. We eat purslane quite a lot, but not very popular because people don't know how to eat them. Another reason is purslane, they grow so fast. They produce a lot. We don't like to eat anything that we can get it easily. We want something that we can get it harder, invest more. It's harder to find. We love that. But purslane, we can cook in different ways. We can eat raw. You can put in hot water for two minutes and you can eat them. You can make soup, make anything from it. But today I will make tempura from purslane. I think this is the way that I like to eat the most. The first thing is collect purslane and wash them, clean them very well. The stem of purslane, we can eat all of it because it's very soft. It's very good. And then to do tempura, the main thing is we need all-purpose wheat flour. We don't mix a lot at a time. And we add cold water, water with ice. Not use normal temperature. It's not good. We use water with ice like this. Mix small amount at a time. So the main ingredient is just cold water and flour or all-purpose wheat flour. Before we mix the flour, it's good to put oil in the pot and put on the stove to make it as hot as it can at the beginning. And then the purslane, we need to absorb it. Use napkin to absorb the water out of the purslane so it will not splash so much. And then put vegetables deep in the flour and deep fry. It will fry very quick. When we drop in the oil, it will sink a little bit. And when it floats on top, let it cook a little bit, not very long. We can take it out. That's all. It's very easy way of cooking. But tempura is some kind of food that help people to eat vegetables easily, especially kids who don't like to eat vegetables. But if we make tempura for them, they can eat a lot. We can use all kinds of vegetables to make tempura. But purslane is some kind of vegetable that we don't need to buy. We just get it from everywhere around the house. After we fry them, it will look very nice, very beautiful. It looks like a frozen dill on top of the grass in the early morning. It's so nice. So the tempura can make into salad, any kind of dressing you can use with it. It's very crispy, very crispy outside. Inside is very tender. It's so nice taste. We can eat with any kind of sauce that we like. This one is Worcestershire sauce mixed with soy sauce, half and half. I like this quite a lot. But sometimes you can use sweet and sour sauce, Chinese style or Thai style that people like to eat with fried things. And another way I like to do is just use ranch dressing. That is very easy too. So purslane is very high nutrient. It's very good food to eat. It's the food that we can get everywhere around us. If we eat something easy like this, we can have food almost everywhere. We should not be hungry because the food is everywhere. Purslane is one of the best food.