I’ve been making this simple recipe for over a decade. The cooked egg noodles are stir-fried with meat and vegetables, then seasoned with oyster sauce.
When I made it last week, I used egg noodles that I’d bought from Ray and Barbara at Harkola. The dish included locally grown enoki mushrooms from Mary, ham offcuts from the cheese shop, garlic scapes from Diana, and zucchinis from our neighbour Mark. The cooking oil was pressed from olives grown by Pete’s cousin Andrew, the three eggs were laid by our beloved chooks, and the leeks, onion and garlic were grown in our backyard garden.
We are on a journey, Pete and I, and we’re taking our boys along for the ride.
We now have more knowledge and awareness of where our food comes from than ever before. Over the past few years, we’ve become friends with the folks who supply our ingredients – we’ve visited Diana and Ian on their garlic farm, watched Johnny grow his business to a national level, and laughed with Mark when he found zucchinis growing in his pumpkin patch.
These days, our food feels real. We eat eggs laid by chickens we know, occasionally manage an entire salad bowl sourced from our backyard, go on quests to find hormone-free grassfed beef, and bake all our sourdough bread from scratch.
None of this would have been possible without Fig Jam and Lime Cordial, and all of you who have been kind enough to read my occasionally demented ravings. I’ve made new friendships and rekindled old ones, and been constantly inspired by my fellow bloggers. Discovering new mushrooms or perfecting a recipe for fudge is infinitely more rewarding when I can share the excitement with kindred spirits.
A friend asked me recently why I was still blogging.
“It’s been nearly three years”, she pointed out, “and you haven’t made any money out of it.”
I explained to her that it doesn’t actually have anything to do with making money, although we’re certainly living more frugally than we used to. We started this blog with the aim of recording our adventures, but we’ve found that it does a great deal more than that. Thanks to all of you, it now motivates and inspires the ongoing journey! ♥
Fig Jam and Lime Cordial 