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Today I made a new recipe - Lemon Oatmeal Sugar Cookies. They are very good, but loaded with butter and sugar. I scooped and froze about half of the batter in a zip-lock bag for when I really need a couple of cookies.
I'm cooking my version of a sort of chicken cacciatore for dinner - chicken breasts, bite size chunks of onion and sweet red peppers and celery in a tomato sauce of last summer's tomatoes, served on rice. With it we'll have a salad using mixed lettuces from under the grow lights. We'll have plenty of leftovers as a stew next week.
I made seafood salad, macaroni salad, and marinated bean salad for dinner. We're in the middle of sugaring season now, and I never know when my husband will get home from boiling; it was1:30 a.m. one night last week. So I try to have something quick to heat up. Summery salads are a nice change from that.
We had burgers on the grill.
Monday night I cooked baked haddock, fries, and cole slaw.
Today I made orange muffins, using a chopped up orange and Tang added to my usual muffin recipe.
We had pizza tonight, made with Italian flavor venison sausage. It was very good.
I'm not sure of all the chemistry behind the darkening of maple syrup, but I believe it is related to the development of microbes in the sap over time.
The taste of pure maple syrup varies depends on environmental factors (terroir). It depends on the soil, genetics of the trees, the weather (throughout the year and during the sugaring season), when the sap is collected during the season, and how it is processed. So the flavor will vary from producer to producer and from year to year, or even day to day in the same sugarhouse. Generally, the first few gatherings of the season will make the lightest syrup. As the season progresses, the syrup becomes darker and stronger. The appearance of leaf buds on the trees signals the end of the season, as the flavor of the syrup becomes stronger and eventually very bitter.
The issue of climate change and sugaring is not just the warming temperatures, but the need for alternating warming and freezing that makes the sap run in the trees. It can get so warm out that the sap stops running during the day. Or, sometimes, if it doesn't freeze up again in the night, the sap will run all night.
Lots of interesting things happening these days with maple sugaring!! Yes, the warming temperatures will definitely affect the production of syrup. Sap flows inside the trees when the nights are below freezing and days above freezing. If we no longer have nighttime below freezing temps in our world, the sap won't run the next day. No sap, no syrup.
The sap usually runs for about 6 weeks, mid-February through March. This year, the night temps were below freezing in November, and during the days were above freezing, so the sap ran. Some syrup producers started gathering and boiling then and made hundreds of gallons of syrup by the end of the month. Then the weather changed. We never did have any "winter" until late February, although there were periods of a few days when the temps were right and the sap ran and some producers made more syrup. The question now is will maple trees continue to produce sap from Nov-March? How long might we be able to make syrup? And how does that affect the long-term health of the trees?
Many producers did not tap last fall, and waited for more typical weather in March. We just made our first gallons of syrup on March 12.
Ponder this: All trees have sap. Birch sap is being made into a drink; it's carbonated, and sold in cans. It does not taste sweet, like maple.The climate changes taking place now are affecting the production of maple syrup. It's very interesting what's happening, and I'll post more about it tomorrow.
I made a batch of burger buns, using half AP and half whole wheat. The raspberry pie will wait until tomorrow.
I had a huge tossed salad for dinner; could only eat half of it so will have the rest tomorrow.
Going to make a raspberry pie here - berries from our garden last summer.
I made Date-Nut coffee cake, an old recipe passed on in my husband's family.
We also had taco salad! Great minds . . .
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