Another of the “mountain vegetables” which you can pick and eat is tsukushi, or horsetail shoot.

To eat these shoots, you’ll need to pick them when they are young enough, remove the brown “wrapper,” then saute and season them. I found a tip on cooking tsukushi here.

Of course, nothing Japanese can be truly considered authentic until Sanrio has released the official Hello Kitty version. So now that we’ve covered a few sansai delicacies, I present to you the Hello Kitty bamboo-shoot, fuki no to and tsukushi collectibles. I will go on record now, though, and say that I’ve never picked these in the wild.