Yu choy salad

Winter is the season of yu choy (or choy sum). Where I live, when romaine and red lettuces are selling at over $2 per head, Yu choy costs only $0.68 a pound, fresh and juicy. So it's hard to resist picking up some whenever I go to the market. But yu choy is very sensitive to heat---it melts and shrinks completely in less than no time. After several vain attempts to preserve its freshness during cooking, one day it suddenly dawned on me that I should perhaps give up my dogmatism and try eating it raw. So I simply washed the vegetable carefully in water, spread some Shacha sauce, and munched it off. Then, all of a sudden, it felt like the fullness of life in this vegetable sprang up in my mouth. Since this discovery, I have come to the conclusion that this vegetable will be the theme of my salad plate for winter. Yu choy has a very mild flavor. The leaves taste almost like one of those baby salad greens. The stems are more juicy and crispy.

When I went to the market one day, I saw a big advertisement that say yu choy on sale, with the huge words: 油菜. It's then that I realized that yu choy means you cai. "You cai" really refers to a dish, not a type of vegetables.