It is maple season here in Vermont and operations big and small all over the state are harvesting their maple syrup. Spigots are attached to trees and long tubular lines slash through the landscape ready to send the fresh sap to the sugar house where it will boil down to syrup.
Since moving here my Sunshine and I have become conisours of everything maple. Pancakes are a regular Saturday morning staple in our house and we love nothing more but to adorn them with the sweet brown goodness of true maple syrup.
There is only one hitch in our maple syrup worship and that is the price. A nice bottle of real maple syrup can run upwards of twenty dollars. The syrup is well worth the money but for those of us on a budget it can seem like a needless luxury to purchase a twenty dollar bottle of this liquid gold.
So in keeping with our new pioneer spirit and embracing the culture around us we have decided to tap the maple trees on our property and begin our own maple syrup operation. We aren't planning on anything big time just a few spigots draining into some metal buckets and a lot of boiling.
We figure if it worked for people back in Laura Ingells times it can work for us; although we will be using modern conveniences like a stove to boil the syrup and I absolutely refuse to wear my hair in two braids. How hard can this whole maple thing really be just tap sap and boil? What could possibly go wrong?
Having a flashback of the middle school you in the kitchen making a fancy concoction for our dining pleasure that ended in a trip to the emergency room with a grease burn. Maybe skip boiling sap for endless hours and just wear your hair in braids while you head for Costco and that giant bargain bottle of real maple goodness...
ReplyDeleteHow rude! To this day I can not cook with grease and still bare the scars from this incident, but you go ahead and use the memories of my pain for your own amusement. Enjoy!
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