PentictonNow first ran into Grace MacLennan at the Okanagan Vintage Fair, held March 30th at the Shatford Centre. MacLennan was one of few vendors at the fair selling prepared food, and she set up shop in a secondary room called the Galleria.
Her display was decorated with small handmade signs saying "Wild Pies." Even her business cards were hand-printed. It was an unabashedly homespun look, and it was run by a humble woman who preferred to sit back and let the customers come to her.
And did they ever come. Halfway through the event, MacLennan had sold all but six of the 112 pies she'd brought with her. And the last half dozen were gone in a few more minutes - to folks who'd bought pies earlier and simply couldn't stop themselves from buying more.
We sampled three of her pies ourselves, and were suitably blown away. Though they're not particularly big - one Wild Pie is roughly equivalent to a large slice of regular pie - they were tasty and flaky and thoroughly addictive.
Two weeks later, we were in MacLennan's kitchen, wanting to find out more.
MacLennan lives - and bakes her pies - in an older home on a big property just south of Oliver that also houses a top-rated farm-to-table eatery called Backyard Farms Chef's Table. The folks who run Backyard Farms and own the property live upstairs, and MacLennan does her thing downstairs, in Backyard Farms' original commercial kitchen.
The setting was, expectedly, rural and hippy-ish and just about as far from the corporate world as you can get.
"We have a bounty of fruit all around us," says MacLennan, gesturing to the fruit trees that dot the property. "We have beautiful orchards, heirloom apricots, peaches, cherries, and so much more."
It took MacLennan most of her life to find the spot she should have been all along. And this is it.
"The Okanagan is home," she says. "When I was younger, I had one leg in Saskatchewan and one leg in BC. I came back here last May after a series of events over the last four or five years that were difficult and were depleting me. And I saw it as a clear sign that I really need to follow my bliss or whatever you want to call it."
"I was out here before several times, and just knew I wanted to come back. I was fortunate enough to have my brother, and I could stay at his place in Keremeos. And I have a sister in Penticton too. It's wonderful to be around my family again and be back in the Okanagan."
A "career fundraiser," who spent a lot of years at a desk with a phone attached to her ear, MacLennan had another side, fashioned in her youth, that continually tugged at her. And it didn't involve business suits, offices, or telephones.
It instead focused on foraging for food. Stuff like fruit and mushrooms. And then, most often, baking it into pies.
"The kitchen was my happy place. I love being in the kitchen, being on my feet. For so many years, I sat in an office on my phone. But I'm a mover. I have to be in the kitchen and outside."
"I was really lucky to have my brother who's a forager, right from a kid. He introduced me to the world of foraging and not to be afraid of it."
And now, MacLennan flits about her kitchen, in her first full year at the Backyard Farms setup and first full year baking pies for a living. And she's clearly in her element.
"It started with the tourtiere," she says as she rolls out the dough. "I love meat pies. But it was just my son and me, and we couldn't eat a whole one, so I started making these little tarts."
"And they were so good. So I thought, well, I had all this Saskatchewan fruit in my freezer. Saksatoons, wild blueberries, sour cherries, apples, and I thought I have to do something with that."
"So I started making these little hand pies and put it out to my network and people were so supportive, and it kind of grew from there."
MacLennan say she uses fruit from a variety of sources - and always wild or organic. "Primarily from the Similkameen and Okanagan valleys. The orchard here at Backyard Farms is where I'll get a lot of my fruit. The wild blueberries come from Saskatchewan, picked wild. The Saskatoon berries are foraged. The cranberries are picked wild."
"What I'm about is using the resources we have available, with total respect for what we have. I hope to connect people with really good food, connect them with a taste of what's out there in nature."
We ask MacLennan how she gets her pastry so flaky and are treated to quite the dissertation.
"I worked at it for a long time and tried a lot of things. I use butter pastry, but I use a little bit of leaf lard too, which makes a difference."
"But the key I've found is to keep everything really, really cold while you're doing it. To not mash up your butter. It's got to be in little chunks. That accounts for layers and layers of flakiness. They say if you have cooler hands, you'll be a good pastry maker."
And MacLennan's pies aren't overly sweet, something we really appreciated. "I keep the sugar really low," she says. "For a dessert, I think they're not bad at all. And you've got your fats like butter. Good fats, not oil and margarine and that sort of thing."
MacLennan says she plans to change up her pie roster as the months go on - for variety's sake, and for the simple reason that certain fruits are easier to source at certain times of the year.
"This will be the first big year where I'm putting out a lot of pies. But I do freeze fruit over the winter, and I can use that. I may have four or five pies at any one time, but the lineup will change based on whatever strikes my fancy."
And she's nothing if not experimental. "I'm excited about trying different flavours to replicate, say, the taste of lemon. There things you can use to replicate almost anything that can already be found around here."
"Some of the pies will have a glaze. The salted caramel apple pie has a salted caramel sauce on it. I have a cherry almond glaze, with toasted almonds. A blueberry pie might have a juniper berry glaze, so I make a juniper berry sugar and then mix that with a little bit of lime, and that's really nice. I kind of make it up as I go along."
Having said all that, MacLennan names off four pies she considers her staples. "Salted caramel apple, black cherry almond, Saskatoon rhubarb, and wild blueberry."
Currently, getting your hands - and your mouth - on one of MacLennan's Wild Pies involves a bit of work. That'll likely change as word gets out, and as her newly hired staff gets comfy in their positions. And MacLennan just got some even better news in the form of a potentially "generous investment."
In the interim, you won't find her pies in any Penticton-area stores. But you will find them at the prestigious Penticton Farmer's Market. She's just inked a deal that sees her join the market this Saturday, May the 4th and continue through the year.
And she'll deliver too throughout the South Okanagan on orders of 12 pies or more. Contact Wild Pies via email at [email protected], via phone at 306-291-1524, or via its Facebook page to order.
