Nettle Pancakes

Springtime is almost here! Or at least here in Kamloops we’re still waiting for the last of the snow to disappear, but I know from my newsfeeds that many of you live in warmer places. Some of you are even enjoying your first nettle harvests! Since I had a few cups from last year stashed away in the freezer I thought I’d share a recipe that woulds satisfy my craving for spring flavours, and maybe give you some inspiration.

There are a few recipes that I feel are my family legacy, and pancakes is definitely one of them. Big pancakes breakfasts have such a strong association with family for me that we decided a pancake brunch was the perfect meal to serve at our wedding. This recipe is strongly based on my mother’s, but with quite a few tweaks.

{Jump to the Recipe}

You might be wondering - why nettles? Despite their sting, nettles are a fantastic spring green to forage for, and a bonus is that no one who has them on their land really wants them. When I gathered mine I secured an invite from a perplexed farmer who was more than happy for me to come hack away at the patch of nettles invading their beautiful garden soil. When you are gathering nettles make sure you wear gloves - I used rubber kitchen gloves - and long sleeves. I also used long handled kitchen tongs while picking, and when I brought them home to process. The good news is, once nettles are either dried or cooked they lose their stinging properties, so you can handle them without so much caution after that.

I find it really useful to blanch up all your nettles, and pack them into one cup portions for the freezer. I also roughly chopped mine before freezing so that they would be super easy to use in recipes. Throw in a bag in whatever recipe you would use spinach for. They work great in smoothies, curries, soups, and baking. Nettles have such a gorgeous green colour, and they hold their colour beautifully even after cooking or baking.

For these pancakes the green comes from blending the nettles in with the milk. The result looks like something that Luke Skywalker would drink, but I find it’s the easiest way to incorporate them for baking. I wanted the green to look more like food colouring than flakes of leaves, so I threw them both in my Vitamix blender, and pulverized it until it was smoothie-textured. I would think that you could probably sub out milk for another liquid if you are wanting these to be dairy free. I’ve never tried it, but I’m guessing it would be fine if a bit less rich.

The sky is the limit for toppings, but I used unsweetened vanilla whipped cream, maple syrup macerated strawberries, and candied lilac petals. I really wanted these to taste of spring, and I felt those flavours encapsulated the season for me.

I’ve also done these pancakes twice - once using grapefruit, and once using orange. I think I like the grapefruit better because it is a sort of unexpected flavour that pairs really well with the slight vegetal taste that comes through with the nettles. I was a little worried that either the taste or the colour would stop my children from eating them, but so far the “green pancakes” have been a hit for both the one-year-old and the four-year-old.

I think these have great holiday potential - a little late for your St. Patrick’s day celebrations this year, but perfect as “Grinch Pancakes” at Christmastime! I could also see using these if you wanted to make a bunch of other colours (not totally sure what to use for the other colours though) and have rainbow pancakes for Easter or Pride celebrations. Basically they are delicious, fun, and they add two cups of greens into your pancake meal so all in all it’s a total win in my books. If you try them out let me know what you thought in the comments!

Nettle Pancakes

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
• 2 cups sifted or all purpose flour
• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 cup oil
• 3 eggs
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 grapefruit, zest and juice only
• 2 cups stinging nettles (blanched and frozen - can sub frozen spinach if no nettles are available)
• 2 cups milk

Takes 30 minutes, serves pancakes for a family of four.

Instructions

1. Begin by heating your griddle or nonstick frypan, or heating butter/oil in a regular frying pan. You want it to be preheated well before you pour any batter.
2. Mix dry ingredients together.
3. Thaw nettles and drain of excess water. Blend milk and nettles together to a smoothie-like consistency.
4. Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients and add eggs, oil, vanilla, grapefruit, and milk. Mix just to the point where the batter is well combined and there are no lumps.
5. Ladle out the pancake batter onto the pan to your desired size. Make sure you keep a good amount of space around them for ease of flipping and because these do tend to puff up a bit.
6. Your pancakes are ready to flip when you see bubbles popping up in the middle, and when the outside edges are less shiny with bubbles that pop there staying open.

Eat the Dandelions

Spring is the season of flowers, rebirth, planting, and so many other wonderful things. I’ve also come to notice that it’s the season for people to talk about bees. As a forager, a gardener, and an environmentally concerned citizen of the planet, I am very happy when the general public also remembers that bees are important. Since they play a key role in most of our food production, bees and other pollinators are vital to our survival so we are right to be concerned about protecting their food sources and habitat.

This concern for the bees gets demonstrated in all sorts of ways. Just today I was shopping and samples of Honey Nut Cheerios were being given out (very difficult to eat that sample as you’re pushing your shopping cart), along with packets of sunflower seeds to plant to ‘save the bees’. They even changed the design on their box to show a blank silhouette where the cartoon bee would be, to remind you that your beloved breakfast cereal is dependent on the bees not going missing. This is all well and good - even practical by giving out the sunflower seed mix to plant.

The most common thing I’ve noticed these days is that people demonstrate their care for the bees in the same way they do for almost everything else: hitting ‘share’ on a Facebook meme.

I’m sure you’ve seen these kinds of posts. They usually make the rounds on social media this time of year saying something like:

“Dandelions are the first food for bees in the spring. Don‘t spray them with pesticides! ”

— Random Meme on Facebook

This concern for the environment is great, but can we find better ways of expressing it than just sharing a Facebook post? I see this kind of thing all the time for all sorts of issues - and occasionally I’ll share some things that I find important too - but I hope that I can also say I’m working in other ways to make a positive change in my world than just clicking one button online. In the end, I do hope that people are discouraged from spraying weed killer, and if the Facebook posts are helping that’s great.

There has been an offshoot of this making it’s way into conversations about foraging.

I still have so much to learn about foraging, but over the past few years the humble dandelion and I have developed what you might call a relationship. We’re both descended from European transplants, and have naturalized here in North America. I let them grow in/near my garden, and they grow huge (I take care of my soil) and feed me. You can eat the entire plant from flower to root, and it’s all delicious. I’ve written here about using them in pesto, and also adding them to egg noodles. All this doesn’t even mention the role they play in bringing beneficial insects to my plants. Basically, I love the dandelion. It really might be my favourite plant.

Bracelet is the sterling silver spoon bracelet from my shop.

There is a ‘rule of thirds’ in foraging - meaning that you take no more than a third of any given thing when you find it, and leave the rest to serve it’s purpose in nature. Exceptions would apply for invasive species (take it all), and the rare ones (take none). This sometimes gets combined with the advice about leaving the dandelions unsprayed for the bees, and people get very vocal (usually on the comments section on social media and blogs) about making sure you leave some dandelion blossoms for the bees when you pick some for yourself.

While there is nothing really harmful in this advice, I maintain that - for dandelions - it’s not really necessary. Dandelions are by no means the first or only food for bees in early spring. Here in Kamloops they are only just blooming, but the bees have been out and about foraging for a few weeks already. Don’t forget that dandelions are imports from Europe, so before they were here the pollinators had to have something available to survive until settlers brought them over! Dandelions are plentiful, and definitely valuable for many insect species (not just bees), but you’re not going to endanger the bees by picking too many of their blossoms. They also have a very long blooming season, and send up several flowering stalks at a time so even if you did pick every blossom you saw another would be waiting to shoot up and replace it.

I also don’t appreciate adding unnecessary barriers to people enjoying the nature around them. Dandelions are easy to identify and have no toxic lookalikes, so I like to encourage people who want to learn about foraging to start there. I wouldn’t want them to read one of those comments and feel unsure of whether or not they should pick them.

If those Facebook memes convince people to appreciate this amazing little plant that is awesome. Please don’t take this to mean that I approve of people using broadleaf herbicides on their yards. I just like to correct misinformation where I can. I also feel that encouraging people to eat the dandelions will discourage them from spraying them.

I’ll leave you with some encouragement to pick and eat dandelions without worrying about if you are destroying a fragile ecosystem. Enjoy them! They are as healthy and delicious as they are cheery and bright.

Sumac Ginger Honey Hearts

Hello! There used to be a whole section here with me describing the amazing Flourist sifted red spring flour I use in my baking. I was trying to add something to this and some other old articles, and I’m not sure how but it all got deleted! Continue reading for the recipe, and some more details about how to find and use sumac.

{Jump to the Recipe}

Sumac berries infusing in cold water.

Strained and completed sumac infusion.

I have to admit, that making these cookies is a bit of an involved process. This is especially true if you are foraging the sumac, and processing it yourself as I did. Here are some instructions that are very helpful if you want to go that route. If not, you can usually find dried and ground sumac at specialty spice stores, and I even saw it at my local Bulk Barn (bonus shopping here because at some locations you can bring your own container and your purchase will be zero-waste). I’m sure there are online options as well.

Sumac is a shrub that grows native in many areas of North America. You can identify it by it’s compound leaves, and large, compact berry clusters that stick straight up from the branches. The berries aren’t juicy, and they are covered by tiny hairs, and malic acid which gives it the distinct sour, almost citrus-like flavour. In most areas you’ll want to harvest the berries in July, and before any large rainfall hits as this will wash away much of the malic acid. That said, it’s not unheard of that sumac berries are still harvestable later on in the year - just rub them with your finger, and then lick it to see if your finger tastes sour (that will be the malic acid that transferred to your finger). If they still taste sour they are still good to use! The easiest way of processing them is just to bring the berry clusters home and let them dry thoroughly. Store them somewhere they won’t get dusty (I have mine from last summer crammed in a 1/2 gallon vintage mason jar) and they are ready to use whenever you need them.

Some of you may have been told that Sumac is poisonous. In the plant world there are many different common names, and sometimes poisonous and non-poisonous plants even share the same one. This is the case with sumac. Poison sumac (Toxicodendron vernix) only grows in swampy areas, whereas the sumac we are looking for (Rhus glabra, Rhus typhina, or Rhus copallina, depending on the species that is local to you) prefers dry landscapes. It also has red berries, whereas poison sumac has white. There really is no chance that you will mistake the two. One thing you will want to be cautious about, is that sumac is related to mangoes, cashews, and poison ivy. If you are especially sensitive to some of these other plants please take caution if you are trying sumac. This post on identifying sumac varieties from Eat the Weeds is an excellent resource, but please make sure you consult more than one resource before eating anything you have foraged.

As always please take care when foraging, and make sure you are 100% certain of what you are gathering and eating. The best option is learning from someone who is an expert on the local plants for your area. Use more than one resource when identifying plants that are new to you like field guides, and reputable online resources - the more specific to your location the better. Spend a lot of time examining the different features of the plant you are looking for. Never be content to identify a plant by one feature alone.

Now to explain more about making the cookies themselves! They do take some time to make, but I promise you the end result is worth it! I originally made these at Christmas time (being inspired by traditional Danish Christmas cookies like Honninghjerter, and Pebernødder) and they were the first to disappear from the cookie platters! The holidays were very busy, and even though I had originally planned to post the recipe back then, but I ran out of time. I think that turned out to be a good thing in the end though, because they are also so perfect for Valentine’s Day!

You’re going to need to start the sumac infusion ideally two days before you want to have the cookies (although you could get away with the day before, but they are better if you have a bit longer for letting the dough chill). All of the colour in these cookies is completely natural - there is no food colouring at all! The lovely pink in the glaze comes from the colour of the sumac infusion itself, and that is also where the sour flavour from the sumac shines the brightest. Since lemon or other citrus is often paired with ginger in holiday baking, I thought sumac would be a delicious pairing with the ginger and I set out working on making a ginger-forward, spice cookie that blended well with the natural sour, fruity flavour of the sumac.

The day after your sumac has infused, start making your dough. This is essentially a sugar cookie with a lot of spices that gets rolled out a little thicker than normal. You’ll also want to make sure you have time to chill the dough for a day if possible. The flavours need time to mingle together in the dough before baking. if you have to speed things up at least chill the dough for a couple hours. This will also make rolling them out easier.

Make sure you leave a fair amount of room between the cookies on the sheet because they tend to puff up a bit, and spread ever so slightly. I also put in the instructions to roll them out a bit thicker than many of these are in the photos. This is because we found out after eating them all that the thicker ones were better!

When your cookies are baked, decorating them is very fun! Prepare your sumac glaze to be a little runnier than your ginger one. You’ll be dipping the cookies into this glaze. Try to let as much excess run off back into the bowl as you can. I found that I had a lot of glaze pooling under the cookies as I let them dry on parchment paper. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing because it tasted really good to have extra glaze, but it was a little less professional looking, and the glaze didn’t go as far. If this happens to you too and you run out of glaze just make a little more and keep going. No big deal!

When the cookies are all dipped let them dry before drizzling the ginger glaze over top. This will make sure that when you sprinkle the candied ginger over top it will only stick to the white icing. I did some with candied ginger, and some without, but everyone ended up liking the ones with ginger better. If you’re a little more sensitive to the heat of ginger feel free to leave that step out - they look and taste great without it too!

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Sumac Ginger Honey Hearts

Ingredients

For the Cookies

• 3 cups flour
• 1 cup butter
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 3/4 cup light honey
• 1 large egg
• 2 tbsp sumac infusion (prepared ahead of time)
• 2 tbsp dried sumac powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 2 tsp fresh ginger (grated, or very finely minced)
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 1/2 tsp white pepper

For the Glaze and Decoration

• 3 cups icing sugar (approximate)
• 2 tbsp sumac infusion
• 1 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp vanilla
• 1 tbsp milk/water
• 2 tbsp corn syrup (divided)
• 1 cup candied ginger (to be finely minced)

Takes two days, serves several dozen cookies depending on the size of the cookie cutter used.

Instructions

1. Two days before you want the finished cookies, prepare you sumac infusion. If you are using fresh/dried sumac berries, add a couple drupes worth of berries to a pint jar, and combine with 1 cup cold water. Leave in the fridge overnight. If using sumac powder you either purchased or prepared yourself, add 3 tbsp powder to one cup of cold water and leave in the fridge overnight.
2. The day before you want to bake the cookies prepare the dough. This dough really needs to be chilled overnight to let the flavours come into their own more fully before baking. If you don’t have time for this, at least chill the dough for a couple hours, but overnight will be better.
3. Cream butter, sugar, and honey together until well emulsified. You shouldn’t be able to see any sugar crystals, and the resulting mixture should be light and fluffy.
4. Add the egg, vanilla, sumac powder, 2 tbsp sumac infusion, and continue to cream the mixture until well emulsified. It should all look like one cohesive mixture with no visible clumps.
5. Add the salt, baking soda, and spices. Mix well.
6. Last of all, add the flour slowly, mixing on low. Depending on the humidity levels of the flour and your kitchen you might need to add a little more or less, so keep an eye on the dough as you add the flour and stop early, or add a little extra depending on how it looks and feels. Don’t let the dough get too dry, though. It will firm up and be easier to work with after it spends some time in the fridge, and you don’t want your finished cookies to be too floury. Aim for your dough to be fairly sticky at this point, but not overly runny.
7. Transfer to an airtight container and leave in the fridge overnight, or at a bare minimum a couple hours.
8. At this point preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Roll out the cookies to a 1 cm (or just under 1/2 inch) thickness, using a little more flour on your work surface and rolling pin to keep the dough from sticking. Cut into hearts, and continue this process until all your dough is used up. I don’t find too big of a difference after re-rolling the excess dough a few times. I also feel that ingredients - especially foraged ones - are precious, so I like to make sure I use as much of my dough as possible. The yield here will depend on the size of cookie cutter you use, but you should end up with a couple dozen cookies either way.
9. Leave some space between the cookies on the baking trays, because they do tend to puff up and spread just a little bit, but they will definitely still maintain their heart shape after all of this.
10. Bake the cookies until they are just barely beginning to brown on the edges. This will be about 15 minutes per tray, depending on how your oven runs. Mine seems to run a bit cooler than most, so I often end up needing to leave things in a little longer. You can also usually tell when the cookies are almost done because you’ll start to smell them as they bake.
11. Remove the cookies from the oven and allow them to completely cool before you start decorating them.
12. While waiting for the cookies to cool this is a good time to start preparing your glazes. You’ll do one in a larger amount with the sumac infusion, and one with ginger powder and vanilla.
13. Combine 2 cups icing sugar, 1 tbsp corn syrup, and sumac infusion to make your first glaze. Add the infusion slowly so that you get the right consistency. You want it to be thick enough to coat whatever is dipped in it, but runny enough that the excess will still drip off when you dip the cookies. If you overdo it, you can always add more icing sugar to thicken.
14. For your second glaze, add the remaining cup of icing sugar and corn syrup, as well as the ginger powder, vanilla extract, and milk/water (go slowly as you add this - you may not need it all). You want this glaze to be slightly thicker than the other since it will be used as a drizzle over the finished cookies.
15. Dip all the cookies in the sumac glaze first, allowing the excess to drip back into the bowl as much as possible rather than just leaving them to drip on the parchment paper or whatever you’re going to let them dry on (this just makes a tidier looking end result - if you don’t get it all don’t worry you’ll just have some of the glaze pooling underneath the cookie). I started having problems with pooling, so I started leaving the freshly dipped cookies on a cooling rack for a few minutes before transferring to parchment to continue drying.
16. Drizzle cookies with the ginger glaze, and while this is still wet sprinkle with the very finely chopped candied ginger. Allow this to dry completely before you handle the cookies.

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While the prize for the giveaway on my Instagram feed was sponsored by GRAIN, this post is not. I have been their customer for the past few months and wholeheartedly endorse their product based on my own experience. All thoughts and opinions expressed are completely my own.

Foraging and Gardening Goals for 2019

Dandelion leaves are very nutritious and abundant! Consider allowing them to grow in your yard and you’ll have the lowest maintenance food crop ever!

This year I have decided to pare down my goal setting just a little bit. I used to write out ten different goals for each of these categories, but I realized I wasn’t achieving even half of them. I also realized while looking over my goals for the past few years that I would write one or two larger scale general goals, and then the rest would be just about specific plants. While this isn’t a terrible way to set goals, I’ve found so many things - from weather, vacations, family growth, to other random surprises - can derail the search for growing or finding specific plants, and various things in my life kept doing just that. This year I have a new baby coming, and a smaller garden, so I figured five goals for each category would be a much more fulfilling way of going about things! We’ll see how I like that for this year and maybe next year I’ll do something different. Who knows!

The whole point of why I set these goals is so that I have some inspiration for the year going forward, not about the number of things I actually accomplish in the end or not. I hope you find some inspiration from my goals, and maybe you’ll set some of your own! If you do please let me know in the comments below because I’d love to hear about it!

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I hear magnolia is edible, but it doesn’t grow a lot here. I’d love to try it some day since I saw so many people posting lovely things about it on their instagram feeds last year.

Foraging Goals

Learn more from the local indigenous community.

I feel really strongly that to forage ethically anywhere in North America you have to consider the fact that there is already so much history here of people and their relationship - sometimes even a spiritual relationship - to wild plants and resources. I’ve done small amounts of online research in the past, but I’d ideally love to learn more from actual people. if this is impossible I will definitely be seeking out other resources like books and museums. I feel like this is an important step as I continue to respectfully forage and explore in land that is unceded traditional Secwepemc territory.

Mushrooms

You might be thinking that you remember just reading me say that I wasn’t going to include specifics in my goals list this year, and you’d be correct, but I still want to include mushrooms as a goal of mine this year regardless. I’ve included this as a goal in my past lists, but aside from finding someone selling morels at the farmers’ market last spring, I haven’t really done much in this area. This is such a broad category that I have very little experience with, so even if I don’t end up going out and picking huge amounts to bring home and eat, I still want this to be a focus of learning for this year. One small thing I’ve been doing is to photograph and research the mushrooms I do come across, and I feel that has been a really great start. I missed my local opportunity to do a guided mushroom walk last year, so making one of those happen this fall is something I am very interested in.

With the help of the amazing Mushroom Identification group on Facebook, I think this is an old Turkey Tail mushroom that I came across last spring near the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, BC. Even in its old age it is still beautiful!

Fishing

I know this one is also kind of specific too, but we actually didn’t get out fishing once last year! I’m not totally sure how practical this will be now that we’re going to be a family of four, but I still want to make sure I give it a try this year. Or maybe it’s something I can delegate to Mr. Forager to go find a fishing buddy and bring back some of the delicious local trout that are abundant here! Either way I’d like to try to make it a priority to go out at least a few times this year.

Wild Staples

I definitely want to concentrate on this one more strongly this year. I am very curious about using acorns, and other plants - maybe even pine bark - to create wild flours. There are also other plans I’ve heard about but have very little experience with like cattails that are so useful and nutritious.

If you don’t want to keep dandelions in your yard consider digging up the plants rather than spraying for them. Every part of these little cheery flowers is edible from root to blossom!

Find more flavours.

This might be a bit of a catchall category, but one of the things that I have loved about this foraging journey I’ve been on is finding the new flavours of these local plants. Last year I got a chance to experiment with Douglas-fir cones, for example, and they turned out to be so delicious, and the cookies and flavoured sugar I made with them were so lovely. I’ve also been having so much fun with sumac in the kitchen, so I can’t wait to get out there and find some more delicious flavours to experiment with this year.

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Haskap bushes in my old garden just as they start to get their leaves in the spring.

Garden Goals

Research container gardening.

If you’ve been following along with my blog over the past little while you’ll know that recently I’ve had to say goodbye to my garden of the past four seasons. This year’s garden will be a balcony one, so I am making it a priority to look into what container garden systems work best. I’ve had to consider a lot of different things so far since my deck is south facing, and there is no spigot for watering. I’ll be posting in a few weeks about the kinds of solutions we’ve come up with, and I can’t wait to share it all with you since I know I’m not the only one who would like to continue producing at least some food with only my balcony as garden space.

Research varieties that work best in small spaces and containers.

This one is very related to the above goal, but I felt it was different enough to be considered its own focus. Not only will my garden be dependent on coming up with a system that works (above goal), it will only be successful if I grow the right plants for my environment. I am actually a little bit excited about my new challenge, because I am going to get a whole lot more sun than I used to in my north facing, shady garden. I am thinking I might actually have some decent success with heat loving crops like tomatoes and peppers, and I can’t wait to see what happens!

Early spring in my old garden.

Same view, after a few months of growing.

Continue to produce food.

This goal is very important to me. I know I’m not going to be able to do this on the scale that I am used to, but I still want my garden to be a way to provide at least a little bit of food for my family. I really like working with food crops - especially heirlooms and other interesting varieties. There will always be flowers in my garden too since I want to attract lots of pollinators and beneficial insects otherwise the food crops on my balcony will struggle.

Look into Community Garden options.

I’m not sure if this is something I’ll have time for with the new baby on the way, but I do know that there are lots of community gardens in town, so I’d like to at least look into it a little bit and see what kind of commitment would be involved. I rented a community garden plot one season, and it really didn’t work out, because of the location. I wasn’t able to get there as often as I wanted, and nothing I grew there thrived. After that experience, I know now what kind of things I would grow in a community plot, and what I would keep at home. I think it might be something I could handle if I was growing garlic, rhubarb, or other things that don’t need as much daily attention.

One of my springtime harvests from last year. Lots of leafy greens!

Grow lots of herbs.

This one will be very convenient to focus on for me, since a lot of herbs do well in smaller spaces, and that’s definitely what I’ll be working with! I also think they will help create a nice environment on my balcony, and help add a little bit of biodiversity to my other plants. This is one of the easiest ways I can still grow things to eat as well, since snipping some herbs from the balcony and bringing them right in to my kitchen is so easy. I’m excited about this goal, and am planning to cultivate a large collection!

Calendula blossoms harvested from my garden last summer.

Douglas-Fir Sugar Cookies

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

1. Preheat your oven to 250˚F.
2. 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.
3. Add the egg and vanilla and cream until emulsified and the mixture is homogenous.
4. Sift dry ingredients together in a separate bowl, and add slowly to the egg/sugar/butter mixture.
5. 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.
6. 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.