Trying to get blood from a stone

In the "Unclear on the concept" category:


No, it's not a trash can/rubbish bin - it's a sap bucket!

Maple syrup - it's not just for pancakes!

It is sugaring season again here. Last week on my commute I saw the first sapbuckets out - a real sign that spring is on its way. We'll probably go out for breakfast at one of the sugar houses next weekend. (We were planning to go this weekend, but just didn't manage to haul ourselves out of bed on time, what with the change in the clocks and a late night for all at a party on Saturday!)

Maple syrup is NOT just for pancakes though. At our local sugar house they sell jugs of syrup of course, but they sell other maple products too. You can buy maple candies, and maple cream. (Think creamed honey, but maple flavoured.) You can buy candy floss (cotton candy) made from maple sugar. They sell 'sugar-on-snow' too, which is a cooked down version of maple syrup poured over a tray of snow so that it cools to a consistency where you can pick it up with fingers or a fork and eat it like candy. You can even do this at home (unlike making maple syrup!) Traditionally it's followed by a pickle to kill the sweetness.

One of my favourite chicken recipes calls for honey, but I replaced it with maple syrup once because I had no honey and it was delicious. There are more recipes using maple syrup here, here and here.

PEPPERY CHICKEN
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 cup sliced mushrooms

Marinade ingredients:

1 tsp olive oil
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp honey or maple syrup (but not the fake maple syrup rubbish!)
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp white vinegar
1/2 tsp allspice (didn't have any of this the first few times I made this recipe and it was still good)
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper (I tend not to bother with this, preferring simply to add pepper to taste once the chicken is cooked.)

Mix all the marinade ingredients and pour over the chicken. The honey or maple syrup is easier to measure if you pour it into the same spoon you used for the olive oil - the remaining film of oil on the spoon helps the sticky sweet stuff slide right off! Refrigerate for about an hour. It's definitely better if you marinate it, rather than just pouring the sauce over the chicken and cooking it right away - which of course I do on occasion when I haven't planned ahead! You can marinade it for longer than an hour and it doesn't seem to harm it.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F, and bake the chicken until cooked.

Slice the mushrooms thinly and add to the sauce surrounding the chicken for the last few minutes of cooking time. I've sometimes added sun-dried tomatoes to the sauce at the beginning of the cooking time too.

Serve with rice or couscous.

I posted about maple sugaring last year, here, here and here. If you're in the north-eastern United States and looking for information about sugar houses that you can visit, try these sites:

• Maple Producers Association of Connecticut
• Maine Maple Producers Association
• Massachusetts Maple Producers Association
• New Hampshire Maple Producers
• New York State Maple Producers Association
• Vermont Maple Syrup

Sugar shack

This one is on my drive to and from work. A real sugar shack! The first picture doesn't show the classic sugar house roofline very well, though you can see the chimney. Even when there's no steam hiding it, the roof's not particularly obvious. It was only when they started boiling that I realized that it wasn't just another run-down farm building. It's clearer in the second, taken from the other side of the farm. I'd never actually noticed the wrecked vehicle until I stopped to take these pics.

Making maple syrup on YouTube

Not for those of you with slow internet connections I'm afraid as these are quite long videos . . . YouTube has more information than you ever needed or wanted to know about maple syrup.
This is from Wisconsin - some slight differences to the way I see farmers doing this in New England, (I've never seen plastic bags for collecting the syrup) but not that different overall. There are other videos at YouTube of more amateur setups. (Although I said don't do this in your kitchen at home, apparently some people do - though perhaps their kitchens were not that wonderful in the first place . . . ?)

Wordless Wednesday - trees on life support?

Maple syrup and sugar houses

I'd been living in the US for years before I went to a sugar house. I'd vaguely heard of them, but didn't really know what they were. Finally, I was visiting a friend in northern Vermont and she took me to a sugar house near her home. Some sugar houses are not open to visitors, but many encourage them, indeed depending on them for much of their business. The one I visited in Vermont had a store attached where you could buy all kinds of Vermont souvenirs, especially ones that were maple syrup related. Others have restaurants where you can buy pancakes or waffles served with, of course, real maple syrup. Some have both. The one we visited last week had a restaurant, and they sell jugs of syrup. The one we visited this week has a restaurant, and a store. They were offering (ok, charging extra for) rides on a horse-drawn wagon and they have a small petting zoo of farm animals. In the summer they sell homemade ice cream. I doubt if anyone makes a living producing maple syrup alone.

Basically, the sugar house is where they boil the sap they have tapped from maple trees, and boil it, and boil it (hence the steam) . . . until it turns into maple syrup. The evaporators are often (but not always) powered by a wood fire, so there is smoke coming out of the chimney as well as steam. I have now learned to tell if our local sugar houses are boiling or not by looking to see if there is smoke as well as steam. Most people just look for the steam, but sometimes the sugar house will run out of sap if the temperatures are not right for the sap to run well, and then the touristy places will just boil water so it looks as though they are boiling sap. Part of the pleasure for me is walking into the evaporator room and being able to smell the syrup in the air, so I am always disappointed if they are just boiling water!



On my first visit to a sugar house, I really didn't know what to expect and was really surprised to find that they were serving small cups of warm maple syrup right from the evaporator!



I had had syrup on pancakes before, and just didn't find the idea of drinking that sticky stuff terribly appealing. I failed to factor in a couple of things though:

• Firstly, I don't think I had ever actually had REAL maple syrup before. It is NOT the same as the maple syrup flavoured brown sticky stuff that many places serve with pancakes. Most brands of 'pancake syrup' contain precisely 0% maple syrup. Some might contain as much as 2%! You'll know if it's the real thing though - it will (of course) say so on the bottle, and the price will make you wonder whether it's worth it. If you're still wondering, don't. Just buy it! It is worth it!
  
• Secondly, the stuff they were serving was warm and runny, not thick and sticky as I had imagined it would be. Fortunately my friend persuaded me to try it - MMMM, was it good!!!!! Somehow, it was slightly buttery and definitely moreish. We circled the evaporator a couple of times and persuaded my friend's DH to take a couple of cups of syrup that he didn't really want so we could have more! This weekend I set a good example to the kids and we only had one sample each.
  

I have learned a lot about maple syrup since then. There are different grades of syrup. The so-called 'best' syrup is quite light in color and has the lightest flavor. Sometimes I prefer the darker, stronger flavored syrups. They happen to be slightly cheaper too. If you see 'cheap' maple syrup at a warehouse store like BJs or Costco, check the quality - it's probably a darker syrup than you would see at the supermarket. Well, either that, or it's not 100% maple syrup. (See above.)

The native Americans were tapping maple trees and making syrup before the Europeans got here. Their methods were much more intensive though. Rather than boiling the sap, the native Americans dropped hot rocks into the sap to get rid of some of the water! Given that it takes 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup, I would guess it either took them a really long time, or what they ended up with was very different from today's maple syrup.



After the Europeans learned the technique from the native Americans, they switched to using wooden buckets.



Later they switched to metal buckets and taps as the wooden ones tended to leak. (The buckets usually have lids on them to keep debris out, but the lid had blown off the one in the photo below.)



The metal buckets are obviously very labor-intensive to empty, so there is now a more modern way of collecting sap from the trees. In an area where there are lots of trees, there are often trees that look as though they're hooked up to life-support with a series of tubes coming out of them. The tubing runs from one tree to the next, carrying the sap downhill to a collection tank, often situated next to the road.



The farmer then pumps the sap from the collection tanks into a larger container on the back of his truck to get it back to the sugar house. The buckets still feature prominently near many sugar houses though as a form of advertising, and on smaller properties where it's not worth running the tubing. Some people who have a bunch of maple trees on their property will have a farmer tap them, and in return they get a portion of the syrup that is generated from the sap from their trees. That would be cool - to have enough maple trees of our own that we could have someone make syrup for us!



Making maple syrup is not something you want to try at home. People I know who have tried it had to redecorate afterwards. By definition, it requires the production of large quantities of steam, and turning your house into a sauna when it was not designed to be one is really Not A Good Thing! (Note the large vents in the roofs of the sugar houses - they are there for a practical reason!)

The photos are all links to Flickr, where they are posted with more comments.

Spring - season of rising steam

The only flowers in bloom around here are the cut daffodils on my kitchen table that were imported from Ireland, but nonetheless it is feeling like spring at last. I see sap buckets on maple trees, and steam rising from sugar houses on my commute to work, and DS and I had breakfast at a sugar house this morning. I'm thinking we may do it again next weekend - hoping DD will have learned from her experience this morning and will get herself ready on time to come with us! (There's no point in turning up at a sugar house too late, as you just end up having to wait forever for a table.) DS requested a trip to a different sugar house as there is one that has a small collection of farm animals that the kids can visit. I think the pancakes at this morning's location were bigger though!





More signs of spring: The potholes are still getting bigger, and the DPW is finally getting started on roadwork projects that were abandoned for the winter (but not, of course, the potholes.) The kids played outside in glorious sunshine this afternoon, even riding their bikes for a while. Admittedly, after an hour they were ready to come in, but we got outside and away from the television! The clocks changed last night, and this afternoon I finally got all the paperwork ready for the accountant to do our taxes. Yay! Spring is truly almost here!