Short Stack, Please

Not because I couldn't EAT a tall stack, at almost any given moment, but because I just don't have enough maple syrup.

My brother, good man that he is, promised me his maple syrup recipe. And I, being the impatient fellow, couldn't wait. So I made my own...without a recipe. Goes something like this:

Tap a sugar maple. Boil it off. Pour over flapjacks.

We're late in the season to sugar trees. It has to be done while the nights still freeze or the trees start to bud, and the sap becomes bitter. We're probably a couple weeks away from losing our good solid freezes at night.

Spring is great, but it's the cold weather that gives us maple sugar and heavy beaver pelts (nope...haven't skinned any yet.)

So today at lunch, I tapped a sugar maple (three taps, actually, on two trees, and, truth be known, I didn't do the tapping). The trees seemed eager to give, drop every second or so. By the time I came home this afternoon, we had perhaps 3 gallons of the stuff in galvanized buckets hanging from trees. Diane called me Pa Ingalls, and I grinned at the thought.

One of the buckets had a leak, so I dumped about a half gallon into a pitcher and found another container. While I made dinner, I set the half gallon of maple water to boiling.

And by the time Ella was in bed, the half gallon had been reduced to, oh, 2 ounces.

Just enough to *almost* fill one of those little taste-of-Vermont sample bottles. I'd probably have filled the thing had I not continuously sampled the process.

It's thick and golden and sweet as you'd think it would be.

So grill me up some buckwheat cakes and pass the butter.

Time to eat!