Hern chai is a vegetable which grows very easily in the back yard. And indeed, as long as there are seeds, little plants would soon sprout.
When we were young we could have hern chai every day, be it stir fried or in soup. And when my grandmother or ngie mah came to visit us, we would cook it with dried noodles for her. It could just be a single dish, or a one meal dish for all of us and we would all be very happy, knowing at the same time, it was a nourishing meal.
To make the noodle dish more tasty my mother would add a lot of ikan bilis or little anchovies.
When my mother had a lot of hern chai growing in the backyard she would collect some and exchange them with brinjals and bitter cucumber. There was quite a bit of barter trading in the vegetable market in sibu. We are very grateful that one particular aunty was so supportive of our mother's efforts to raise all of us single handedly.
It was a diffiult time for all of us but we managed.
Hern Chai helped us a lot throughut our difficult times. And indeed it was God's way of blessing us because out of all those small seeds we had food, without much hard work in tending the soil and adding of fertilizers.
Hern Chai can be grown organically and cheaply even today.
May God bless you with a yardful of free hern chai.
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