Honey Glaze for Epiphany Ham

January 03, 2019 by Kelsey Fast in Eat

A view of the Christmas tree and my 30 week baby bump.

I’m not sure if you know, but we are still in the middle of what was traditionally the Christmas season! I believe today specifically is the 10th day of Christmas, and while I’m not expecting to receive ten lords-a-leaping today I’m still enjoying my Christmas tree, and soaking up a little more holiday season. It seems right to me to continue a little longer since it only just started snowing around here and the tree and other wintery decorations seem appropriate. I do have to say that our new place is so small that a small part of me is looking forward to getting the square footage back in my living room that the tree is taking up right now.

The 12 days of Christmas all lead up to Epiphany, and while that isn’t part of how my family traditionally celebrates the holidays it seemed like a really nice thing to add to our celebrations and a nice way to cap off the season.

We’ve got our Epiphany dinner set for Sunday and I’ll be making a ham. I thought I’d share the recipe I used for the glaze today. Feel free to adjust this to whatever flavours you like. I you don’t have something or don’t like a flavour go ahead and try something different (and if you do I’d love to hear about it in the comments)! Because the dinner hasn’t actually happened yet I won’t have anything in this post about cooking the actual ham, but I’ll try to remember to take a photo to update this post when I do!

Our first time celebrating Epiphany in Kamloops with some dear friends. Read all about it here.

For this glaze, I started with the sumac in my mortar and pestle. I’ll be talking more about this ingredient and where I find it in a later post, but for now you should be able to find it in specialty spice shops. I think I’ve been seen ground sumac powder in the spice section of my local Bulk Barn. Sumac berries have a hard seed inside, so I crushed them with my mortar and pestle, until the dried berry surrounding the seed was crushed and sifted that through a fine mesh sieve. Don’t discard the larger bits either - you can steep those in cold water in the fridge overnight and make a lemonade-ish drink. I’d say from one drupe of berries I wound up with about 1/2 a teaspoon of powder, although I could have been more thorough and gotten more out of it. I wasn’t too worried about that though because I’m going to be steeping the larger pieces anyway for another upcoming recipe.

After the sumac berries were broken down, I added the other whole spices and continued to crush them. After that I added fresh ginger and a clove of garlic, and continued to grind it in my mortar and pestle until the whole mixture formed a sort of paste. At this point I took it out and mixed it with local honey, nasturtium flower infused white wine vinegar, a little bit of molasses, and salted the mixture to taste. It’s a delightful mixture of tangy, sweet, and warm from all the spices and ginger.

Honey Glaze for Epiphany Ham

Ingredients

1/2 tsp sumac powder
3-4 whole allspice berries
3-4 whole cloves
1/4 tsp multicoloured peppercorns
1 dried smoked chilli pepper
1 thumb fresh ginger
1 large clove garlic
1/2 tsp salt
4 tbsp honey
2 tbsp white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp molasses

Takes 15 minutes, Serves enough glaze for one small ham.

Instructions

If you are using dried sumac berries, pound and grind them in a mortar and pestle or spice grinder until the berries are mostly powder and the hard seeds are all exposed. Sift this mixture and use only the powder for this recipe. Discard or save the larger pieces that don’t make it through the sieve.
Add the whole dried spices and chilli to the mortar and pestle along with the sumac powder. Continue grinding until all the pieces are a fine texture and roughly the same size.
Add the fresh ginger and garlic one after the other, and continue grinding the mixture together in the mortar and pestle until it all forms a paste.
Transfer the paste to a small bowl, and combine with the honey, vinegar, molasses, and salt to taste. Adjust all the spices as necessary - go ahead and grind more of anything that you feel is missing. This is all about adjusting to your own preference, but remember you are making a glaze, so the end result should be rather on the sweet side. You want it to caramelize on the ham in the oven while you are cooking it. If you think you might not have enough for your ham, feel free to scale up the ingredients until you have enough to cover it.
Follow your preferred method for roasting your ham, and add this glaze when there are about 30-60 minutes remaining to the cooking time. You want this to caramelize on the outside of the ham, but not to burn.

Reflections on 2018

December 31, 2018 by Kelsey Fast

In the above collage I have what Instagram deems as my top nine posts of 2018. I think they are pretty good, and they hold a lot of memories, but I wanted to do a fuller reflection on my year and share a few other photos that might not have got as much attention based on Instagram’s algorithm, but were very special to me.

I read my 2017 reflections over again before starting to write this one, and was again struck by how busy December is. I had so many ideas and plans that will have to be put off for another time, but I’m really happy with what we were able to accomplish this year.

We had a lot of little trips throughout the year, and we were so happy to be able to take a flight to visit family in Manitoba. There were so many firsts in Little Forager’s second year, and we enjoyed soaking up every minute of them - especially his first real experiences with the ocean, and his first airplane trip!

This year was the first full year the A Forager’s Home Shop was open for business, and it was really nice to have that outlet for my creativity. I really enjoy making things for others, and I have been so blown away by your support in this endeavour! I look forward to what the coming year brings!

In addition to my regular topics, I also took more of a focus on eco-friendly home decor and/or organization on a budget on the blog. There are not a lot of gardening and foraging topics to cover in my area in the winter, so last year I shared how I redid my bedroom spending only $10. I also was able to feature a few of my products in there including the now out of stock autumn forage wreath, and the golden pinecone garland (still in stock and available in gold or silver via the link to the right).

I was able to make so many beautiful wreaths for the shop this year! Some of them were absolutely one of a kind, and will not be made again, others I will probably recreate like the sagebrush wreath and twig wreaths below. The Autumn Forage Wreath (pictured above in my bedroom), and the Summer Forage Wreath (pictured below, second from the right) were made from what was available at the time, and while I might make something like them again, I won’t be able to exactly recreate them. You can shop the current wreath collection by clicking here.

I was also able to work on lots of items from recycled fabric this year, and that gave me a lot of joy. I get my fabric scraps from various groups that are doing really worthy work. Some of them come from a few of the ladies that are a part of my Church’s “Sewing for Dignity” group that makes clothing, baby blankets, and feminine hygiene packs for underprivileged communities. Some also come from my Grandma who is a part of her Church’s used clothing ministry and helps sort out what is quality, and what is unusable from the various donations they get. Previously all of these bits would have just become garbage, so I am happy to give them life as useful, beautiful objects.

I also got a chance to be a vendor at the inaugural season of the Dallas Barnhartvale Farmers’ Market this summer. It was a really great opportunity to meet a lot of local people, and the support from my community was incredible. I’d be absolutely happy to do it over again next season!

This year also involved a lot of winter! It snowed straight through until April, so we made great use of our snowshoes, and skates. Kamloops is very beautiful in the snow! This year Little Forager also began what might be an undying love of skating and hockey. He’s now a diehard Blazer’s fan, and loves watching the Canucks on TV. This Christmas he got his own pair of tiny skates and is hard at work learning how to stay up by himself on them.

This year - unbeknownst to me - was my last season with my garden. I have so loved working on that project, and feeding my family with my own two hands. Balcony gardening is my future, and I am looking forward to the challenges and learning experiences that will bring. Even without the space I am used to, I will still be keeping the “grow” category of topics alive here on the blog.

2018 also featured a lot of recipes! I enjoyed writing the “meals from the pantry” series, and might pick that up again this winter if there is interest, and I also love creating and sharing the recipes I make from foraged ingredients. This is “A Forager’s Home”, after all!

If you have been reading this blog for the past little while you’ll know we recently had to move house. I was hoping to do some sort of “holiday home tour” this month and show off how we set up our new place, but our crazy schedule got the best of us, and all I have to show you are these few photos below.

We spent Christmas with my side of the family in my parents’ new place. This was the first year they had enough room for a full Christmas tree, and I have to say it made it feel a lot more like Christmastime knowing that my parents had their tree set up!

This photo of Little Forager sleeping in the glow of the Christmas tree is possibly a candidate for my absolute favourite photo of the year.

I’ve saved our biggest news of the year for last - although we’ve already shared it quite a bit so you might already know. This year we were so thrilled to find out that our little family would be growing by one in Spring of 2019! We are expecting a little girl to join us, and we couldn’t be more excited!

2018 was a complicated year, but filled to the brim with good things, and we can’t wait to see what 2019 has in store for us! How was your year? I’d love to hear how things were for you in the comments.

Douglas-Fir Sugar Cookies

December 07, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Eat, Find

It’s beginning to look at least a little bit like Christmas over here! There isn’t all that much snow compared to the last couple years, and November was unseasonably warm. No matter what the weather is doing Christmas is on its way and I’ve got a great sugar cookie recipe to share with you!

Douglas-fir might be a common choice for Christmas trees, but the one behind this plate of cookies is an artificial tree so don’t use this as an example if you’re trying to make a positive ID!

Where I live Douglas-fir trees are one of the dominant features in our landscape. You can see a whole bunch of them in the panorama shot below of my old backyard view. Pseudotsuga menzesii aren’t a true fir tree at all, and come in a couple varieties - one coastal, and the other inland. The latter ‘Rocky mountain Douglas-fir’ (or pseudotsuga menziesii var. glauca) is what we typically find in our area. They have a few different features, but their uses are the same. I haven’t had a chance to taste the coastal Douglas-fir, so I can’t comment on the difference, but this recipe could be made with either. The main thing I’ve observed is that the cones are slightly different shapes, and there are a few other differences in the overall growth habit of the trees.

There are very few naturally occurring coniferous trees in the BC Interior that are poisonous - and in fact all trees in the family Pinaceae which includes the Douglas-fir are completely edible. The main danger you might come across the Western yew. This is not actually a coniferous tree, but it is an evergreen and is very toxic, so make sure you know what you’re gathering. You can tell it’s yew because of the way the needles connect to the branches, and the little red “berries” called arils that grow on it. These arils themselves are technically edible, but the seed inside them, and the branches they grow on are one of the most toxic substances growing in nature. I don’t say this to scare you off foraging from trees, but rather to encourage caution and that you’ve studied enough to feel confident on your ID. Eat the Weeds has an excellent article about yew that covers much more than I have time for here, and the Provincial Government of BC has a really great online guide to common native trees in this area.

The flavoured sugar I made this spring/summer was using the green cones of the Douglas-fir. I really loved the way the sugar turned out, and was already dreaming of making Christmas cookies in the shape of Christmas trees, using actual Christmas trees as one of the ingredients! These are really easy to identify if you’re a little nervous about your tree identification skills. If the cones you’ve gathered look like my photo below you can be fairly confident that you’ve not gathered anything poisonous, but please don’t rely on my photos alone for identification purposes. Pick up a reputable field guide (like the BC Government one I linked to above), and use more than one feature as your basis for identification. Douglas-fir cones have these little bracts that stick out which makes them easy to spot. There is a legend that a little mouse tried to hide in the cones from a forest fire and got stuck there. When the cones are fully dried (like in the wreath I have in my shop) you can see how the bracts look like the hind feet and tails of little mice! This makes them really easy to identify.

This sugar cookie recipe is great using the flavoured sugar (and I’m already thinking about making some lilac or rose flavoured ones with the floral sugars I made earlier this summer too), but it would be equally as good as one done with just plain granulated sugar. I also want to go out and try to make some sugar with the mature needles of the tree and see how that tastes. I was kind of hoping that the sugar and the resulting cookies would be greener, but as you can see the outside of the cones were a very light green, and when you cut them open they are white inside, so what I ended up with was a very light coloured sugar that actually turned more yellow in time, and didn’t colour the resulting cookies at all. I also want to do a taste comparison with the mature needles because I think the taste would be stronger, and I want to know if that would be a good thing, or an overpowering thing! Most of the advice you find online about using pine/fir/spruce needles for food is that you usually gather the immature tips in the spring when they are the most tender. If I end up doing a follow up experiment I’ll definitely be posting the results either in a follow-up post, or editing this one to reflect it!

As it is, the taste of the fir cones is fairly subtle, but it comes through such a simple recipe like this in a really pleasing way. You aren’t going to raise any eyebrows if you include these on your holiday cookie platter, but they still have a little extra something in their flavour profile that sets them apart from your average sugar cookie. The flavoured sugar when it is fresh tastes almost like a Sour Patch Kids candy - acidic and almost citrusy. This is because Douglas-fir naturally contains a lot of vitamin C. I found that over the months of storage the brightness in the flavour mellows somewhat and you notice more of the resinous tree flavours that were more of a backdrop when the sugar was fresh.

Here you can really see the little flecks of Douglas-fir cones in the dough.

You don’t need anything special for this recipe, although I highly recommend GRAIN flours. They’re not paying me to say this, but I so appreciate what they are doing, and the quality of the flour they produce. I know exactly which place in Canada (Etzikom, AB) the wheat for my flour was grown in and that makes me very happy.

I also like to use a marble rolling pin (because of the weight of it, and because you can throw them in the freezer to make them really cold for rolling out pastry), and I love the shape of this vintage cookie cutter I found in an antique store even if the handle and backing part make it a little tricky to see if you are overlapping your cookies when you cut them.

I also found that chilling the dough for this recipe was really important. It helped the flavour from the sugar seep into the dough more, and also helped make it easier for rolling. It ended up being a bit on the sticky side for sugar cookies, so you’ll need to flour your rolling/cutting surface, but try not to add too much or else that’s all your cookies will taste like. Just use the bare minimum to keep things from sticking. Also please note that the temperature in the recipe below is not a typo! I used to think that you were supposed to cook sugar cookies at a hot temperature for a very short time, but my pastry chef friend showed me another way that in my opinion results in a much nicer cookie. You’ll need between 20-25ish minutes per batch in the oven, but it is so worth it in the end for the overall texture so just trust me and give it a try. You’ll also need to rotate the tray in the oven, and what I mean by that is halfway through the baking time (after 10-13 minutes) you’ll pull the tray out and turn it so that the cookies that were in the front of the oven are now in the back. This was another step that no one really taught me before, but it helps ensure the cookies are all baked evenly.

Douglas Fir Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

1 cup butter
1 cup Douglas fir Sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups flour (plus more for dusting when rolling dough)

Takes 1 hour, serves 5 dozen.

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 250˚F.
Cream butter and sugar in mixer until butter is light and fluffy, and no granules of sugar remain. This step is particularly important for these cookies because the homemade flavoured sugars tend to be on the coarser side and you don’t want big sugar crystals in your finished cookies.
Add the egg and vanilla and cream until emulsified and the mixture is homogenous.
Sift dry ingredients together in a separate bowl, and add slowly to the egg/sugar/butter mixture.
Chill dough in the fridge for a minimum of two hours or up to two days. Dust counter with flour roll to 1/4 inch thickness. Cut into desired shapes. You can choose to re-roll the scrap dough as many times as you like but the more you do it the more flour will be incorporated and the quality of the cookies will suffer some, but not to the point of making them less delicious. I chose to use all my dough since my flavoured sugars are a bit precious and I wanted to make as many cookies as possible without wasting.
Place on parchment lined baking sheets in preheated 250˚F oven. Bake for 10-13 minutes, rotate cookie sheet so the cookies in the back are now in the front, and bake for another 10-13 minutes until cookies are baked through but have not begun to colour on the edges.

Apple Muffins with Sourdough Starter

November 26, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Eat

If you’ve been following my Instagram page, you’ll have noticed some posts and stories about trying to revive my very dormant sourdough starter. Basically this entails feeding it like crazy, until the microbes start to revive and everything gets all bubbly and happy again. During that process if you don’t use or discard a portion of your starter you’ll just be overrun with the stuff, and since I’m a big fan of zero-waste, I’ve been trying to use it in various ways.

One thing that I’ve found really interesting is that you can use sourdough in a quick bread recipe, and it reacts with the baking soda in the same way as adding another acid. This recipe uses some starter, but if you don’t have it try omitting it, and substituting the juice partially or in full for yogurt, or buttermilk. Alternatively if you still want them to be dairy free try substituting the starter for applesauce, and a bit more flour. There should be enough acid in the juice and the applesauce to activate the baking soda, but it won’t be quite the same in the end. And if you don’t have a sourdough starter making one is really easy! There are a lot of awesome tutorials available if you give it a quick google.

You’ll also notice this recipe calls for ‘pumpkin pie spice’. I don’t normally use ready made spice blends, but the one from Silk Road Spice Merchants in Calgary is amazing and I highly recommend it. I also used the Western Family brand Wassail as the juice in my muffins since it is what I had in my fridge at the time, and so these muffins were very heavily spiced. I felt like this was perfect for fall/winter food, but you can use whatever mix of spices you like. Pumpkin pie spice usually contains cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, allspice, and ginger. Use these spices in whatever ratio you like them best and your muffins will be delicious.

There isn’t too much in this recipe that needs a lot of explaining, but do make sure you combine the wet ingredients (sourdough starter, oil, juice, eggs, vanilla) and sugar in one bowl, and the rest of the dry ingredients in another bowl until you are ready to mix your final muffin dough. The starter reacts with the baking soda really quickly, and this reaction is your primary leavening agent so you want to make sure that is almost the very last thing that happens. I like the apple grated into the muffins, but it does tend to disappear into the overall texture that way, so if you want them to be more obvious try chopping them into small pieces and mixing that in. I save myself a step and don’t bother peeling my apples since you don’t really notice the skins when they are all baked into the overall texture.

Let me know if you have any further questions in the comments! I’d love to hear how these turn out for you if you give them a try!

Apple Muffins with Sourdough Starter

Ingredients

1 cup sourdough starter (any type)
1 cup apple juice
2 large eggs
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 cup oil
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp pumpkin pie spice
2 cups all purpose flour
1 apple (grated)

Takes 35 min, serves one dozen muffins.

Instructions

Preheat your oven to 350˚F.
Combine sourdough starter, juice, sugar, eggs, oil, and vanilla until smoothly blended and homogenous. If your starter is a bit stiff this might take a little bit of time, but make sure there are no lumps remaining when you are done.
Whisk the dry ingredients together, and then combine with the wet ingredient mixture. You will notice the baking soda reacting to the acid in the sourdough starter almost immediately, so it is important that you work quickly and don’t allow the mixture to sit for long. Stir gently until the mixture is just combined. You don’t want to over mix this.
Gently stir in grated apple.
Evenly distribute your batter into one standard size muffin tin.
Bake for approximately 25 minutes or an inserted toothpick or cake tester comes out clean.

Grow Write Guild No. 2 - Dream Garden

January 21, 2015 by Kelsey Fast in Grow

I realize that it has been a while since I have posted one of these - in fact it has been a while since I have posted anything at all, but I'm going to keep on trying to keep this current. The big move changed a lot of things for us and I've had a difficult time getting back into the swing of things here.

This topic comes at a pretty good time, since it is the very beginning of a new season and there is not much I can do in the way of actual practical action. Right now my yard looks like this:

I'm going to have to wait a while on the planting!

I guess the garden of my dreams would be large enough to feed my family year round. It would be beautiful, and use permaculture techniques so that my food would be nutritious and benefit the environment. I would grow heirloom, open pollinated varieties and save my own seed so that I could have a hand in preserving agricultural heritage. Basically I would like to grow anything that my family needed: from cut flowers, to food, to Christmas trees! I would also be interested in having chickens as a part of my garden to help eat my weeds/scraps and to provide me with fresh eggs. I also would be interested at some point in keeping bees to help pollinate my garden and to harvest the honey.

While most of the things I have outlined are very practical, I would also like my garden to be a place where I can relax and enjoy the beauty of nature. I hope to be able to make it so that in every season the garden looks beautiful - not just in the spring and summer!

I guess while this was meant to be a "dream", it is still attainable as long as I can someday have the land to do it! Even in the mean time here while we are living in rentals and don't own our own land I am going to work at taking steps towards my dream garden.