I recently spent a week in a fruitless search for new digs up in the woods of New Hampshire. Most of my time was devoted to viewing ugly 1960's ranch homes that, tragically, are in my price range.
My spare time, however, was spent in a friend's barn standing over a giant vat of boiling sap, watching my hair curl in protest. It is sugaring season in the great Northeast. This means that enterprising young pseudo-farmers like my friends devote entire days and evenings to the hot, sweaty, sticky process of making their own maple syrup. The ritual involves lugging heavy vats of yucky sap from collection buckets to the barn, followed by hours upon hours of standing around, ruminating on the boiling mess in front of you.
The children entertain themselves by courting death in various ways - falling from the loft of the barn through the open doorways, swinging from the chains suspended in the barn (used to haul the huge vats of sap up), and attempting to examine the boiling sap up close.
We discovered that, as visitors, we were hot commodities: people to help with the sugaring who were not committed to their own trees on their own property. My husband bonded with his Vermont buddies over boiling sap. I lingered with my best friend, who was stuck sugaring solo that week. Alcohol was consumed. Kids ran wild and muddy through the place.
The culinary aspects of this ritual are limited. There's beer, as I've mentioned. Aside from that, the highlight of the day/evening is hot dogs boiled in the sap. Really.
Now that we're safely back in the land where only oil and strawberries are in season, we're left with a lot of questions about our choice to live in a place where watching boiling sap is good fun. Oops! I mean... we're left with... a lot of syrup, fresh from our friends' farms.
So, forks in the road.... I'm looking for ways to cook something yummy and maple-y that is NOT a breakfast food. Any great maple-syrup recipes out there?
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