What’s the Buzz at Cornect Family Farm?

Visiting with Margaret Cornect at her home in Denver, Guysborough County, almost made me want to quit my day job in the city, move with hubby into the neighbourhood, and soak up the quiet life by taking daily walks through the blueberry fields in my wellies and sipping tea on the deck – infused of course with some of Cornect Family Farm‘s new lemon honey cream.

I was lucky enough to visit with Margaret at her lakefront home, which is settled on a 500-acre property complete with trout filled ponds, rolling hills, and blueberry patches as far as the eye can see.

It is home to many a wild animal (bears LOVE bee grubs!), travelling geese in need of a resting point, their hilarious dog Shiloh, and of course – Cornect Family Farm. It’s perfectly easy to understand why her honeybees are successful in producing copious amounts of honey – they’re happy and living in paradise!

In 1994, the Cornect family decided to expand the family business of blueberry farming to try their hand at beekeeping. The two seem to go hand in hand – bees were necessary for the pollination of their blueberries, and blueberries provided bees with nectar for the honey. Seems like quite a practical relationship really.

What started out as just a handful of hives to pollinate blueberry bushes has turned into a business with approximately 400 hives and the production of roughly 23,000 pounds of honey annually. Until quite recently (with the purchase of a new extractor seen in the photo below) said honey has been extracted lovingly from each and every one of the several hundred hives by hand.

What I find amazing, is not just the science behind how honey is actually created and how fascinating the bees are, but the fact that Margaret has learned how to work with and care for the bees herself, by trial and error.

Now I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t willingly stick my hand into a beehive without formal experience or training. Admittedly, I’m the girl who goes running when a bee is within 10 feet of me though. Most everything she has learned has been gleaned from reading books, and simply spending time with the hives and their inhabitants – it’s quite impressive.

Margaret and her family have built the business from the ground up and continue to work together on everything from selling at local farm markets, designing labels, helping with the website, building a new storage facility for the hives, to extracting honey from the hives – by hand. And of course, everyone gets to help with the taste-testing of their artisan honey products – clearly the best part of this particular family business!

Before reluctantly heading back to the city and my little postage stamp sized property (which seems even smaller after spending time on the Cornect family’s 500 acre lot), I picked up a few products to take home to see what kind of honey-flavoured concoctions I could come up with. I’ve always had a hard time figuring out what to do with honey myself, so I would like to share some ideas for how to use these wonderful products in the kitchen.

I taste-tested the honey spreads first as they peaked my curiosity. I’d never even heard of such a thing before, but boy am I glad I was introduced! Cornect has recently created a lemon honey spread, chocolate honey spread, and cinnamon honey spread – all of which I highly recommend.

They were tried many ways – as a topper for my waffles, a filling for crepes, by the spoonful (delicious straight out of the jar!), swirled into cups of tea, as a fruit dip (simply warm up the jar in the microwave then dip away), as a spread for scones (the lemon honey spread was fantastic with blueberry scones), a spread to eat with crackers and cheese and my all- time favorite – on toast. What a delicious way to perk up dreary breakfast bread.

The cinnamon honey spread tasted like a sweeter version of a childhood favorite – cinnamon toast, and the chocolate honey spread was an excellent, more health conscious substitute for a chocolate spread like Nutella.

The spreads are all natural and gluten free – the lemon honey spread is made with organic lemons, the cinnamon honey spread is made with pure cinnamon and the chocolate honey spread has only natural fat from the cocoa so it can be eaten guilt free.

Since hubby and I were soon to part for two weeks, I wanted to use my new honey to make a special appetizer and entrée for him before I left on a business trip. We are both cheese and bread fiends, so I made crostini with gorgonzola, ricotta, toasted walnuts and apple slices complete with a heavy drizzle of my new Cornect liquid honey. It was a hit and we fought over the last crostini. It’s rumored that honey is an aphrodisiac, but I firmly believe it is also a peace maker as we made amends and split the crostini in half. This ordinarily doesn’t happen in my household.

For dinner we had baked salmon with a honey-mustard glaze. I added some of my Cornect creamed honey to a mixture of Dijon mustard, soy sauce and minced garlic which created a wonderfully sweet glaze with a nice crunch around the edges. The same mixture would be equally delicious with chicken, ham or a pork roast.

While preparing lunch for another day, I looked at my jar of honey BBQ sauce and then at the weather outside and decided that using the sauce to barbeque was not high on my list of priorities – I didn’t relish the idea of standing in the rain to cook lunch and neither did Steve.

I decided instead to make a barbeque chicken pita pizza and can honestly say it was the most flavourful pizza we’ve cooked at home, simply because of the sauce.

Although the photos may not show it, we deemed the pizzas (shredded chicken mixed with our Cornect barbeque sauce, mushrooms, red and green onions and Monterey Jack cheese) to be restaurant worthy. The label on the sauce says “Leaves you hurting for more” and indeed it does – it’s spicy enough to leave you with a bit of a “sting” after a few bites.

Cornect products can be purchased at a variety of shops and markets all over Nova Scotia and you can also call Margaret and arrange to stop by and pick some up in person.

Consider this a warning though – once you visit the Cornect Family Farm and see how beautiful it is, you won’t want to go home!