Making Maple Syrup

 

I wrote this article a few years ago and posted it, but on this warm and windy March day, I think it is worth repeating.

There have been several articles in both the local and national press lately saying that maple syrup is ‘Good For You’.  That it has antioxidants and other good stuff.  I knew that a long time ago because I was a maple syrup producer for over a quarter of a century and we used this kind of info to market the product. Here is some of the research: 

Maple Canada's pure maple syrup label - 'Maple Syrup contains significant amounts of potassium (35 mg/tbsp), calcium (21 mg/tbsp), small amounts of iron and phosphorus, and trace amounts of B-vitamins. Its sodium content is a low 2 mg/tbsp. Maple syrup can be declared a good source of 3 essential elements - calcium, iron and thiamine';

and

Wikipedia's entry which says 'Maple syrup has a number of nutritional benefits for humans. It is low in fructose compared to other popular sweeteners such as high-fructose corn syrup and agave syrup - extremely high percentage of fructose can be deleterious and can trigger fructose malabsorption, metabolic syndrome, hypertriglyceridemia, decreased glucose tolerance, hyperinsulinemia, and accelerated uric acid formation. Maple syrup is an excellent source of the trace mineral manganese, with 2 tbsp (13.33 grams) containing about 0.44mg or 22% of the FDA Daily Value (DV%) of 2 mg. It is also a good source of zinc with 2 tbs (13.33 grams) containing 0.55mg or 3.7% of the FDA Daily Value (DV%) of 15 mg.' 

 

I could keep on with this, but you get the picture.

 

Depending on whom you ask, sugar has 50 or 60 calories per tablespoon.  So does maple syrup.  It is, after all, sugar.  For some people it is an acquired taste - my son-in-law dislikes it, for instance.  But most people, given the chance, love it. My grandfather used to pour it on eggs; my father had a dish of prunes with maple syrup most days.  Both of them got through an imperial gallon (four litres and a bit) or more each year, single handed. However, the single, simplest reason people avoid it is that it costs a lot.  In our district, which produces a lot of Ontario's maple products, a two litre container sells for $38 and a cup of granulated maple sugar is $5.00.  That's right out of most people's comfort zone.  Especially when cane sugar and the syrup made from it are so cheap.

 

It was not always so. If you read Susanna Moodie's nineteenth century diary, 'Roughing It In The Bush', you will find her complaining bitterly about having to use maple sugar since she could not afford 'white'. The maple flavour spoiled the taste of her tea. White sugar was imported into Canada then and I think most of the expense was generated by transportation.  Moodie lived a long way from the lakes that provided the only easy way of moving around Upper Canada and even then the sugar had to come by ship from, I think, the West Indies.  Maple sugar, on the other hand, could be had by drilling holes in hard maple trees, collecting the sap and boiling and boiling and boiling the water out.  

 

Sap has, if you're lucky, three percent sugar.  Syrup has sixty-six percent sugar.  That's a lot of water to boil away.  But wood was free, except for labour, and the only expense in creating maple syrup back then was the cost of big iron kettles.

 And time and labour, of course.  Using kettles over an open fire, you moved the condensing sap from kettle to kettle, kept the fire burning hot, and skimmed constantly.  Several gallons a day would be a good haul and you would have to stand over the kettles constantly.  Labour intensive, for sure. Photo credit,

 

Throughout the twentieth century, techniques for making maple syrup improved, as did those for making cane sugar.  The cost of importing the cane sugar also dropped precipitously.  Even with purpose-built evaporators for maple sap, reverse osmosis techniques for refining sap and plastic tubing collection, however, the labour required to make maple syrup kept the prices high (and the equipment costs rose with the new techniques).  When producers switched from wood fired evaporators to oil fired, the price of fuel added to the cost.  And when the family sizes decreased, labour had to be hired, at North American prices.  Now even the huge maple bushes of ten thousand or more taps cannot compete with imported sugar; maple products have become a luxury. Even at the high prices presently current, maple producers are not making a lot of money.

 

This high cost requires that maple products be marketed as luxury goods.  And the talking points are many.  Maple is authentic, the marketers cry.  It tastes far better that the stuff put out by Aunt Jemima. Lately, with the surge of interest in local and naturally nutritious food, the push has been to market maple syrup as a healthy alternative to regular sugar as well as the connoisseur's choice. Thus the news releases dropping nutritional information, accompanied by advertisements singing the same tune.  I made a poster for a neighbour's sale tables that said, in part, 'In this world of processed products with their additives and such, Be sure to think of maple for that sweet, nutritious touch'.  Specious as all get out, but that's the marketing game.

 

There is a point to all of this. Along with a lot of other people, I think we in North America are poisoning ourselves with too much sugar.  If a family were to calculate what their yearly intake of white sugar would be, price the total cost, buy the amount of maple syrup that amount of money would bring them, and then use only that amount of sugar, they would be a good bit healthier at the end of a year.

 

If they had access to a maple bush and made their own syrup, they would be a great deal more fit, too. I speak from personal experience

as my husband and I, with help, ran a small maple operation for over twenty-five years. It is hard, unrelenting labour to tap, boil and bottle maple syrup. If you are not slogging through heavy snow in the bush on snowshoes, you are heaving chunks of wood into the fire under the evaporator or anxiously measuring sugar content. We live in maple syrup country still and have neigbours who make and sell syrup and sugar. In fact, tomorrow they will be slogging through the bush making sure tonight’s high wind did not break branches and pull their tubing apart. Maple syrup is worth every penny you pay for it.

 

Disjointed, disgruntled and, therefore, full of Digressions.

 

I wrote this over several days - it is quite a ragbag of thoughts unfinished.

And then my darling daughter posted this ... the blossoms are apple.

It is February the sixteenth, a winter day in Lanark Highlands. And here we are, sheltering at home. Or, we are most of the time. As of the today we are due to come out of lockdown and go to ‘green’ status. The husband and I cheated however, by having friends in to dinner on Sunday and hosting our ED and her family on Monday. I do not feel the least guilty about this as we should have been allowed out of lockdown last week like the counties north and south of us. The fact that we are going to green status should make that clear.

 It was really nice to talk to someone face to face and share a meal. The weirdest thing about lockdown, for my part, seems to be the way time stretches and contracts. A morning can disappear while I do a Sudoku and read the papers. An afternoon can be absorbed by a self-indulgent nap. But January lasted forever. There were months and months of it, seemingly. With only a few very hurried trips to the pharmacy or grocery store to break it.

 All of Canada is waiting for vaccination and some of us are being very snarky about it. The orders that our government put in last fall may not be honoured and the federal government, specifically the Prime Minister, is being blamed for it, especially in the more ‘conservative’ press. That we are not at the front of the queue does not surprise me. We do not have any facility that can manufacture vaccines and the countries that do are quite overwhelmed. Not to mention, favouring home consumption first. Big surprise that. Not.

 Well, that was then. It is now the second last day of February and we were blessed (humph) today with a fine fall of nice new wet snow to go on top of the nice old deep snow. As they said in the days of sail, ‘No bottom with this line’. As one of my daughter’s friends posted who had tried to snowshoe in it, it was deep and very difficult to walk in. Their dog let them break trail. We had a dog that liked to ride on the back of our snowshoes. I feel for the syrup producers who are on the verge of tapping and will have to cope with this. Unless, of course, it sets up. Every snowshoer’s dream.

 Canada now has a third vaccine approved. Not that this will stop the cacophony of complaints about slow roll-out. I figure we are lucky to have vaccines at all and do not see that the date at which 75 and up (that’s me) will be on the roster is unreasonable at April 15^th. There are a lot, a very great lot, of people in vulnerable positions, essential workers of all kinds, who need the shot a lot more than I do, including the harried young people stocking the grocery shelves and handing me my prescription drugs. I can wait. Even if we do cheat a bit.

 Next week I have an appointment to get my back assessed, a pool therapy class if the assessment is good, and book club and discussion group meetings that might take place in person – masked and distanced, but unZoomed. It would be nice to be looking forward to things staying that open, but I figure we have one more lock-down at least to go judging by what else is happening in the world. Now if I could look forward to a restaurant meal, that would be Nirvana.

We have ...this. Plus, since I snapped this shot from the front door without checking to see if the camera lens had opened fully, more snow. The bent tree on the far right is an apple tree. It does not have blossoms. 

 

Snow Kidding

 The daughter in Pakistan sent an email yesterday saying that she missed the snow. Yeah. I had to drive to our shopping town yesterday and it was an, um, interesting drive as the weather was doing one of those things it does in Eastern Ontario in February. Cloud, snow, wet and clingy, wind, sky clearing, more wind, cloud arriving, more snow, and repeat. So, I slithered, breathing through my mouth, part of the time and stepped cheerfully along in the sun for the rest of the time. We have snow. We have almost all of the snow that the snow gods have dumped on us for the last month. 

I have a blogging buddy called Nance, who just put up a post about shovelling. She may need counselling soon. Oh, Nance, if you want to do some shovelling up here, feel free to pack the scraper as well because there are spots where it will be needed.

I just took some photos from our porches. Our unshovelled porches. YD, feel free to admire as you sit in your garden where, I imagine, you have flowers. 

Tomorrow we have a fine young man with a strong back hired to shovel the roof. 

This is showing the laneway out to the road. 

Laneway behind the house. 

The field. Under that layer of snow is my rock garden. The bit of blue on the far right side is a tarp covering JG's woodpile for next year.

To sport with Amaryllis in the window

 And two more blooms to come. She is a thing of beauty and a joy for the next few days at least.

Mother Love

 

I can’t resist doing this, I really can’t. I do promise not to cross post this to Facebook though.

 I just watched a video of my highly-competent, very professional (at the top of her profession) daughter giving an impassioned speech about picking up litter and policing green spaces. The video also contained a clip of her picking up after a group of children, stuffing the litter into a plastic bag.

 I was impressed.

 And then I had a metal picture of what her room looked like when she was a teen-ager.

 I am still stifling peals of unholy mirth.

You know that saying about a prophet being without honour in their own country? Yeah.

A Sad Day for the USA

 

I have spent this afternoon staring at my computer screen, wishing, so much wishing, that what I was watching was fiction. Sadly, it was not. Tragically, the lawless and misguided, in concert, managed to cause a death in their ‘protest’, as well as a lot of quite possibly permanent damage to their country. It is clear to any even slightly informed and objective onlooker that this mess was instigated, facilitated and admired by President Trump. It is even more clear to this onlooker that the United States of America is presently in trouble and that a great deal of time, ink and money is going to have to be used to try to fix it. If it is fixable. I think that what is the most frightening is that so many people believe the foul concoction of lies and half truths that have been Trump’s stock in trade since before even he ran for president.

 How can anyone not see that the only thing Trump really cares about is himself? (Rhetorical question – a lot of people don’t see it, that much is clear.) ‘Make America Great Again’ should actually be read ‘Make Trump great … and keep him that way.’ And as for the election being ‘rigged’, there is no way it was. Too many eyes on it for that to happen. The eyes of the whole world on it, for goodness sake. I could almost feel sorry for McConnell. Almost. He is going to have to deal with the fallout in the Senate. The person I do feel sorry for is Biden. I do not see how he is going to be able to clean up all of this toxic confusion, let alone get on with his agenda.

The article that was accompanied by this photo is worth a read, I think.

 Oh well. Up here in the Great White North we have our own political idiots, in some number. Do you think it would help if Trudeau were to shave and get a haircut? Or if he would just stop talking? I take some comfort from the fact that Canadians are not about to storm Parliament in any number waving the British Ensign or even white flags. (In fact, there were a few, quite Canadian, demonstrations. (See news article on Canadian protests).We will just endure our lockdown, wear our masks and mutter to ourselves. And that is just fine with me.

Hindsight 2020.

 

 New Year’s Eve, 2020. We are planning a meal of left-over turkey, followed by an hour of TV watching and an early bedtime, the better to greet the New Year. Such wild excitement, you say, should not be permitted at our advanced ages! Perhaps you are correct and we should eschew the television. The series, after all, is purported to contain sex scenes of some heat. One would not wish to spoil one’s night’s sleep.

 As if. A year of lockdowns, masking and grim statistics is finally over and vaccines are beginning to arrive, with high hopes for all. No one except the dourest of prognosticators would have predicted this year and its misery. As a senior with compromised immune system, I am clinging hard to the idea that the vaccine roll-out will be fast and efficient so that we can resume the even tenor of our pre-Covid lives, more or less. For so many, a lost family member or friend who succumbed will forever leave a sore spot on their hearts and a gap in their lives. For the rest of us, things have been frightening, frustrating and futile. We had, for instance, a small New Year’s celebration planned in the form of a roast beef dinner in a restaurant with good friends. Cancelled, as so much has been.

 It is both useless and unfair to condemn the past months entirely. There have been good happenings.

There has been fun. One of my best memories is the item that I awoke to find on my birthday. My insanely jokester neighbours had manufactured a gnome out of cedar branches and, adding a sign saying Happy Birthday, installed it on the lawn.  I modified it to add a mask and remove the sign, since the latter had melted in the rain, and it graced our front yard for quite some time. A fine work of art indeed. The ‘gnome’ offensive is not a new one. I have found gnomes in trees and flower beds, and many on-line representations to mark various occasions. And I do confess to, very occasionally, trying to reciprocate. Mostly, though, they win. The amount of wiring they had to do to create the Birthday Gnome had to be seen to be believed.

 It is easy to find beauty where we live. In season there are lovely falls of snow, (I am not sure of the date of this photo, but beautiful it is), gentle rains, sunshine and flowers, birds at the feeders, deer and the very occasional bear in the field behind the house. I was fitted with hearing aids this year and have rediscovered the joys of bird song, frog song and the ability to hear the sparse traffic as it turns in front of our house, enabling me to keep track of the neighbours and the school bus.

 This year we removed the wood furnace that has warmed the house since it was built, and had a propane furnace and new, larger, air conditioner installed. It is a lot less work for JG and it enables us to warm up the house by changing the thermostat setting before we get up, a nice change from hiking down to the basement and fiddling with lighting and stoking the furnace. We also got a new mattress for our bed, not before time, and are now sleeping on a flat surface without two dips in it. For now, anyway.

 Small things add cheer and interest to days that all seem to melt into one another, far too much the same. An orchid that friends had given us grew a new stem and produced, all at one time, ten blooms. I gloated over it a lot. Here is its portrait at the five-bloom stage, with the buds swelling happily. My cacti did not give me the same satisfaction, although one that was also a gift from neighbours did pretty well. And my daffodils were splendid. The weirdly warm week we had early on got them started and the second batch of spring brought most of them out. I only seem to have a photo of the beginning, annoyingly enough.

 A less beautiful thing that spring brought was an infestation of caterpillars - as I recall, two types, Forest Tent and Gypsy moth. The oaks were very badly affected and lost a whole set of leaves. Stubbornly, they grew a new set, much smaller but sufficient, we hope, to carry them over. JG did a lot of caterpillar squishing and egg mass removing but only the coming spring will tell us if they are going to make it.

JG assessed the big maples that framed the entrance to our laneway and decided that enough rot had set in – whether courtesy of the ice storm that stripped them or just from old age – that they needed to be cut down. He hired a tree removal company and a crew of young and agile men arrived, complete with bucket truck and chipper. In only a bit over two hours they limbed and chipped the trees and removed the trunks. The sound wood will make fine firewood. No tree around here is ever wasted. Inspired by the way they were whipping the chainsaws around, I did some research and found that there are machines called ‘arborists’’ chainsaws, lighter than the ordinary kind. There was a lightbulb over the head moment, and I go one for JG for Christmas. 

He seems to be pleased.

 Christmas now has come and gone and a good turkey dinner was had by all. New Year’s Eve has also come and gone and I am writing this on New Year’s Day. We had a fine Christmas, those of us who could gather. But we did miss the absent family members, especially the YD whose job is too intensely busy to allow her to quarantine for two weeks both ways just to spend a few days at home. She does seem to be getting the best out of her posting, though, getting in lots of hiking in amazing territory and just slogging away, getting the job done.

So, that was Hindsight is 2020. Hoping for a better 2021.

 

 

Just Desserts

 Reporting on Christmas Day, we gambled and had the immediate family here - JG's brother, who lives solo, and the ED and family, for a total of six people. At our local store, one can order a fresh turkey, and JG put in our order for a small bird earlier in December. When I picked it up, I thought it felt a bit heavy but, hey, it was the Day Before Christmas Eve, I had a list of stops, and I just grabbed it, paid and ran. Leaving the tag with the weight behind. When we did get around to weighing it, on Christmas morning, we had eighteen pounds of bird. Delicious bird, sections of which have returned to the city with the ED's family and to Brother's home as well.

There was, um, lots of food. There was even more dessert, the tastes of the attendees being various. To make everyone happy, pumpkin, pumpkin mincemeat and apple are required. There used to be Christmas pudding, with sauce, as well, but that got left out this year. I made the three pies, the grandchild and her father produced an eye-popping bouche and there were enough cookies and chocolates removed from stockings to stock a candy shop, and I am vaguely considering opening one. We certainly have enough sugary treats stocked to last through our newest lock-down.

 Please note that the apple pie did NOT run over. This may be a first in fifty plus years of Christmas baking. 

Christmas

 Some years ago, the YD was posted to Nigeria. She brought this creche and the musicians behind it home for us. I used to put it out when the grandkid was a small girl, but have not done so for some time. This year it seemed appropriate. No stable, but I do not think that matters.

I think there is a wise man missing, but the player makes a good third Magi. 

To all my Facebook friends May you have a wonderful Christmas or holiday celebration.

Blooming!

 I do not have a green thumb. In fact, I can kill just about any plant I have ever been given. But, quite a while back some neighbours who have not only green thumbs but whole green hands gave me an orchid. It bloomed politely. And then it sat there. The neighbours came for a meal and pointed out to me the spot where it should be cut back. I did that. 

And it sat in the window and I watered it. A new leaf bracket appeared. And then a new stem appeared and the old stem sprouted.

Just look at it now. Five flowers out.

And stay tuned. There are at least five buds more. 

Fun with Printers

 

I posted here a short while ago about losing a fight with my Photo printer. This last week I had another project to do and it occurred to me, forcibly, that it was Time For a New Printer. Researching, choosing and buying new electronics causes me to come out in an itchy nervous rash, but ... it had to be done. 

And so. Surfing around the net, I found several fine sites that gave me a run down on The Ten Best Printers, and How to Choose the Best Printer for your Jobs, and All About Printers. Read same. Made a list. Okay, step two is finding one of these at a store near me. Now, there are no stores near me. The closest places to buy electronics are a minimum half hour drive. In good weather. It was not good weather; there was wet, sloppy snow, a good dump of it. But, since I had to go to the city anyway for a medical event, my poor, long-suffering husband offered to drive me, and we could stop at the city electronics stores. Back to the net to see which stores were 1.) open and 2.) had any of the printers on my list available. 

Miraculously one store on our route fit these parameters. Clutching my list, we launched off into the slush and drove to the place. Masks on. Get into the line-up. Gosh, no line. So, where in this big box place are the printers? No one available to ask. We drifted around and finally found an employee on her way to somewhere and asked her. She pointed. We trundled off to the corner where the printers were hidden and found a shelf on which were placed several boxes with the printer I wanted. Score! Um, just a minute. Printer is no good without ink. Found the ink shelves. No ink for this printer. We lined up at the Geek desk to get someone to help us as the store was singularly lacking in staff.

When we finally found someone to help us, he couldn't find any ink for this printer either, but allowed as how there might be some at another store in the complex. We were not about to take this gamble. What DO you have that has ink, we asked.  Well, there was one printer that sort of fit my parameters that had the ink with the printer in the box. One. I was almost afraid to ask about its paper feed capacity, and the young man whom we had found was not sure either, but by this time it was any port in a storm. And the printer was a reputable brand, although not the one of that brand that I had on my list ... however, I did remember that it had been described with some praise. 

Printer purchased. Medical appointment met. Other shopping done. We sloshed back to our happy home at about supper time and I was not in the mood to set up this more than intimidating machine. We did take it out of the box. 

The next morning JG was off to our local town for the morning, and I was left with The Printer, and a small pamphlet of instructional drawings. A second piece of paper listed an on-line video of how to set the printer up. I found the video, after some skull-bending navigation through the manufacturer's site. Watched the video. Watched it again. Ran it back and hit pause. Did step one. Ran the video for step two. Did step two. All went gloriously well until the time came for the printer to print an alignment page. It did not print. Many small lights flashed. I reran the video several times, opened and closed all the doors. Several times. No joy. It finally dawned on me that I had turned the machine off. Turned it back on. Alignment page printed. I was in.

When JG came home, he said that he was astonished that I had been able to set up the machine, including a wireless connection. He figured we were going to have to get someone to do it for me. Hah.

I can report as of this writing that the new printer does a fine job and the type of paper I want to use feeds just fine. And it is supposed to have enough ink in the installation to last for a year. We will see.