It took me just about 2 hours to reach the Zen Organic Farm in Fan Ling on that Tuesday morning. Mr. Ng picked us up at the Sheung Shui train station and drove us to the farm which was about 15 minutes away. When we arrived I felt like home.

Joey, Mr. Ng and their Mother gave us a truly heartwarming welcome. Mum prepared a cold infusion of Roselle in water - superbly refreshing! My trip to see the tree we've planted over a year ago was way overdue.

While Mr. Ng and my colleague were discussing, I did my little round and discovered a lot of different things. First of all, there were about 90 kids from a school seating downstairs, listening to Todd's speech. Todd is the mastermind behind Homegrown Foods in Hong Kong. I couldn't help listening to his lecture as it was truly inspiring. Raising the awareness of children in regards to biodiversity, usage of chemicals, fertilizers and other hormones was just SO right.

While children might still be flexible enough to listen, I think too many adults aren't ready to agree and that is a sad situation. Todd had prepared a whole range of fresh organic produces from the farm which are in season now to show to the kids that for example a real lemon isn't as good looking as the one you have in a supermarket. Expanding on how globalized food companies hold their monopolized market by projecting images of how a lemon or a tomato should look like. And I swear, while Todd was speaking, I was commenting all along to my colleague Angela on how companies like the evil Monsanto trashes every efforts farmers are doing to grow fruits and vegetable naturally.

Anyway, back to the Zen Farm... The structure of the farm is amazing. I noticed a lot of natural insect traps around the plants; also, the main plantations are covered in mosquito nets to avoid damage to the culture. I noticed a few very clever gardening methods that my brother also uses back home in his permaculture garden; definitely a sign of knowledge and know-how from Zen farm!

Around the corner was a whole bush of Roselle ready to be harvested, lovely to see it, but we weren't there for the Roselle. There were 2 massive areas with fig trees and one of them was nothing less than the tree we've planted about a year ago where I even came across the WOM guide tree! The trees were starting to give fruits, but not all of them were ripe as the temperature didn't fall enough. We're in the middle of November and it is still 25 degrees! Anyway, there were 2 kinds of figs ready to harvest. The golden figs (or how we call it in Europe white figs) and the purple figs. Both were delicious and you could eat the fruits with the skin as it is so thin.

We later brought back the figs to the house and discussed about it lengthily. Thin skin, fragrant and perfectly sweet - the only lack was the inner color, but who cares - these figs were miniature atomic bombs! I remembered the chutney I did last year and wanted to do something with it.

So, once we've got back to the hotel, I straight away cooked the chutney to later use it inside a financier tart. I thought the fresh figs would blend well with the season's spices such as star anise, cinnamon, vanilla, a touch of honey and vinegar too. Then the hazelnut butter flavor of the almond financier brought all that together and I served it with a quenelle of blackberry frozen yogurt and blackberry sauce. This dessert is definitely going on our Lounge Restaurant special menu!

The usage of locally grown food is what people need to support, you can call this literally "Farm-to-table" cooking and that is exactly what needs to be done, just like what Todd and Homegrown foods are doing. Admirable.