Behind the Food-Maple Sugar Weekend

The weather is getting warmer, the mud is deep, and the sap is running. For those of us who are done with winter, the mud is a welcome sign; even if it means that there is a chance my car might get stuck on the way to a local sugar house.

I grew up with the good stuff, and there will be no fake maple syrup in my house at any time. My grandfather had a sugar house, I grew up going to friends' sugar houses, my co-workers have sugar houses, my husband's birthday carrot cake will be made with maple syrup (not molasses), Little Man will grow up knowing how amazing fresh syrup tastes, end of story.

For those of you who did not grow up in the North, here is the process:

You tap your local maple tree (or your local several thousand trees - Vermont made 890,000 gallons of maple syrup last year: it's coming from more than that one tree!) and let the sap drip into the bucket below. The low-tech version means someone goes around to each tree and empties the bucket; modern-day people run lines from tree to tree and feed it back to the sugar house.

Once the sap has made it to the sugar house, the water is boiled out of it, creating a sweet smelling mist in the air. Some poor fella has to keep everything hot by throwing wood into the fire under the arch (the boiling thingy) every five minutes. The best place to be on a cold day is in the sugar house...of course that probably also means the sap is not running and frozen in the lines.

Then comes the best part.........

Pour the hot maple syrup on snow (or in this case crushed ice) and enjoy.

Behind the Food - Goats Galore

I need to change up my blog a bit. So, hang on as we take you on an adventure through our local eating habits, and learn why we think it is important for Little Man to grow up knowing where his food comes from.

To start off with, we occasionally purchase goat meat from one of my co-workers. Even though we can't get it as often as we would like, we love it! We also love going to visit the new baby goats in the spring and, yes, my son does know that this is where our goat meat comes from. (No, not from the baby goats - we do wait for them to grow bigger.....and tastier!) We try to tell Little Man where his food comes from, even if he's captivated by cute animals. ( I actually freaked out one of my family members when I mentioned to Little Man at Thanksgiving that the turkeys on the farm down the road would be gone - like "in somebody's oven" gone - when we got home.)

Part of the reason we teach our toddler about where his food comes from is to try to show him that the healthiest, best-tasting food doesn't come in a wrapper printed 'McTasties' or from a mega-farm halfway around the globe. The food that we hold dearest is usually local, fresh, and respectfully raised. What does that mean? Local means from our own backyard, the farm down the road, even a farm one hundred miles away - not thousands of miles away. Fresh means eggs collected this morning, carrots pulled from the ground just a day ago, or meat straight from the butcher to our freezer- no barcodes or styrofoam trays involved. Respectfully raised means vegetables grown in season without dangerous chemicals, meat animals raised in clean, natural environments, and food produced with an eye towards a sustainable future. There's more to it than just that, but we'll try to work that into later posts. Anyway, back to the goats......

This guy followed Little Man the entire time we were there.

At times he even brought his friends along.

This one was my favorite.

Eggs, Flowers, and a new Blog

I realized that we have been so busy doing new things that I have neglected to blog. So here goes........

Our family continues to fight the cabin fever battle, and went to the Vermont Flower Show this afternoon. It was great (Unfortunately we brought the wrong camera and the pictures do not do it any justice).

This is the only good flower picture we managed to get.

Little man when we first entered the kids area....

Little man when mommy added flowers to his cool hat.....

The end result!

Chillin in the Hobbit House

One of the best finds at the flower show (that and I found a seed package of my cool purple carrots that we are going to try out this summer.)

Other than the flower show, we have been trying to find recipes that use up a lot of eggs, in addition to our giving them away to every person that comes though the door. While having the light in the coop increases egg production, it means that we get 4 eggs a day. (Cari is the only one who thinks that we have too many eggs: Andy could eat three or four a day, easy!) Some of the recipes have been great: I made some amazing quiche and Andy made wonderful potato-celeriac pancakes. Some recipes have been total flops: I tried to make homemade pudding and my husband has not let me in the kitchen all week because of it.

Mommy's little helper...maybe that's why my pudding did not turn out well.......

My other find this week, was a really fun blog called Stuck in Vermont. Apparently I am not the only one in Vermont fighting cabin fever. While I'll admit the person who does it is a little bit more liberal than myself, it has some pretty good stuff on it.