Once more, with filling

The arrival of warmer weather means lots of green, red and orange in the market. What better way to celebrate spring than with a feast of vegetables, Pauline D. Loh says.

It's March and the broad beans in the garden are running riot. Some bushes are still flowering, while others are bent over with plump pods that threaten to burst their seams. We cannot catch up with the harvesting and the cooking. In the village market, pale green baby zucchini with blossom ends still attached are almost as sweet as sugar. Piles of succulent dark green chili, thick brown pin cushions of fresh shiitake mushrooms and intricately dimpled jade-green bitter melons are all vying for attention, together with pea sprout tips, sugar snaps, sugar-loaf cabbages and the signature herald of the season ?bunches of red-tinted toon leaves.

We are back in Yunnan, and spring is all around us. For a month at least, Tom and I will be feasting and bingeing - on vegetables.

Already, we've had toon leaf tempura, tender pea sprouts flash-fried with nothing more than a small scatter of minced garlic, cool cucumber batons dressed with vinegar and ginger and countless platters of leafy vegetables.

Tom's market excursions yielded such a profusion of vegetables that I had to think of a way to eat it all up.

Finally, we decided to stuff the vegetables with a pork filling. Water chestnuts are also in season and the bright shiny chocolate corms were so tempting that we bought a huge bag. Some will go into the pork stuffing, but we are just going to eat the rest raw, cleaned and cut into snowy white lollipops.

The inspiration for our stuffed vegetable feast comes from a dish we often enjoyed in Singapore and Malaysia - niang doufu, or stuffed bean curd, that offers more than just tofu. All manners of vegetables are also stuffed with a filling of fish paste.

In Yunnan, it's harder to get good fresh fish for the paste, so I am using a pork filling and lightening it up with water chestnuts, coriander leaves and finely diced carrots.

You can actually use any vegetable you fancy, although I am too spoiled for choice, and so I have picked a few more unusual ones to showcase this dish.

First, I blanched some tender long beans, the first young ones of the season. Also called snake beans, yard-long or telegraph beans, these are best eaten when they are a bright green. If they are any paler, they are likely to be old and stringy.

I blanch the beans in hot water to make them more pliable, and coil them up to make a little wreath, which I stuff with the pork.

Bitter melons are much easier. Just cut the melons into thick slices and then remove the seeds and fluffy membranes. There is a small trick to filling up the hole in the center. Just make sure you "plaster" the stuffing to the sides of the melon so it does not drop out as it shrinks during cooking.

Aubergines also make great stuffed vegetables. But the vegetable itself shrinks during cooking so make sure your slices are not cut so thin that they disintegrate during the cooking.

Our little village in Taiping, Anning, produces a variety of fat green chili that is just asking to be stuffed. They don't have much bite, but are heavily aromatic with the smell of capsicum.

The shiitake mushroom caps make great receptacles for stuffing as well, and the richness of the pork will flavor the mushrooms in an unmatched pairing.

I like to pan-fry the pieces of stuffed vegetables until they are golden brown - after which they can be eaten as is, or returned to the pan to be braised in a brown sauce seasoned with hot bean sauce. And when you do that, make sure there's a huge pot of steamed rice ready for the family. They'll clean out the rice pot.

This is a feast where the vegetables are the star attractions and the meat filling merely part of the supporting cast. But it is so satisfying you may want to do it all over again, soon.