October Maple

© Robin Edmundson, 'October Maple', watercolor, 18 x 24 inches.  

I hope you're having a wonderful weekend!  I'm doing my best to eat as much pie as possible.

There's always that one maple in the neighborhood that puts on a show every year.  I love that red that shows up on the south side.   I'm always grateful for how beautiful things are in the fall here.  I've been painting a few of these October scenes to help keep that wonderful color here as long as I can before I switch to the winter palette.

The birds are moving through these days.   Flocks of cranes overhead, flocks of cedar waxwings, starlings, crows and others filling up the trees and gleaning in the fields.   It's an active time of year before things get really cold and quiet.

I think I'm going to start another of these colorful ones today.

Time to Tap the Trees

It's just about that time again.   Time to tap the maple trees and start gathering sap for syrup.   And syrup means SPRING.  

Spring is good.   So is homegrown, home made, maple syrup.   We finished our last bit this week and there was much sadness in Mudville.  

Our old blue sap bags wore out last year and we moved to a tube and bucket system.   Behind the bag in the pic, you can see what I'm talking about.   That's what we'll be putting in in the next day or so.    I'll try to get some pics of how exactly this works.

For more links about how we do this, check out this post.

Maple Blossoms

You really need to blow this pic up to appreciate the beauty of the sun shining through these tassels.  They're exquisite. [Click the pic to biggify.] 

This beautiful thing is a maple flower.  You can just see the tiny leaf forming above it.  A tree full of them reminds me of fringed Chinese lanterns.

Pollen

The trees are blooming and a lot of pollen is going into the hive. 

I'm pretty sure the greenish stuff is maple pollen of some kind.  We have maples close by and they're blooming now.

The orange pollen could be daffodil.

These guys are loaded.  Sometimes there's quite a traffic jam at the entrance.

More of that orange pollen.

Three bees with the maple pollen. 

All of this pollen is very good news.  It means there's brood in the boxes.  Brood means a good queen and a build up of new bees, which means more bees later and more honey.

No drones yet.  The first brood of the year is females - to build up the hive for the season.  Later they'll raise drones.  Our plan is to split this hive as soon as we see drones. 

Cherry and Maple Drop Spindles

Eric has been busy in the woodshop lately and has just finished two new batches of our octagonal drop spindles.  

They're gorgeous. 

Gor. Geous.  

I put ribbon leaders on them because everything looks better with ribbon. 

The first batch of spindles is cherry.     2.6 oz.  9 inches tall.    The hook can go on the top or bottom for top-whorl or bottom-whorl spinning.

These are good for beginners - not too heavy, but heavy enough to spin for a while as you learn to draft.

The second batch is in spalted maple.    Spalting is what makes those cool dark lines in wood.   I love spalted wood.

These spindles are 2.3 oz.   9 inches tall.    Good for experienced spinners who want a good spindle for wool.  Not too heavy, not too light.

These are also made so you can put the hook on the top or bottom for spinning.    


Spindles are $20 and listed on Etsy now.   These tend to go pretty quickly, so don't delay if you want one. 

Apple Pear Maple Jam

So I told you yesterday that I cooked down a big pot of pears all at once.   Well, once they're cooked down, they can stay in the fridge for a few days at the ready for you to make quick jams as you have time.   

I was totally telling you the truth.  

Here is a jam I made with some of those cooked pears, plus some new apples.  

 The pears cooked down further to give the jam a nice soft base, and the new apples stay firmer so there's a nice balance of textures and flavors.  I left the apples in chunks.   This jam is a favorite with my picky eater. 

Apple Pear Maple Jam

• 2 cups cooked pears 
• 2 cups chopped apples
• 1 cup cold water
• 4 Tablespoons Dutch Jell All Natural Lite pectin
• 1/4 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 cup maple syrup
• 1 cup sugar

Combine the pears, apples, cold water, pectin and cinnamon.  Stir well until pectin is dissolved.   Bring to a boil.   Stir constantly until it reaches a hard rolling boil that you can’t stir down.   Boil hard for 1 minute.  Add maple syrup and sugar.  Return to full rolling boil and boil hard for 1 minute.   Ladle into jars.

Note:   The maple is a supporting flavor here.   If you want a serious maple flavor, then use 1 cup of maple and only 1/2 cup of sugar.   Or you can use 1 1/2 cups maple and no sugar.   

Note:  Canned pears are the same as cooked pears.   Use a small can or two, drained, if you don't have this year's pears to cook up. 

Spiced Peaches, Part 3: Peach Maple Cardamom Jam

This is the third installment of Not Your Grandma's Spiced Peaches.

This Peach Maple Cardamom Jam is one of those rare creations in life where the whole is much, much more incredible than the sum of the parts - even if those parts are pretty darned amazing to start with.
   
Food of the Gods.

Plus!  I didn't use white sugar - only our homemade maple syrup.   Bonus points!  

This is a jam that is fabulous on biscuits, but would be phenomenal as a filling in cakes or as an ice cream topping when you want something that's a bit more exotic than plain peach.

Peach Maple Cardamom Jam

• 3 cups chopped peaches
• 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/3 cup Dutch Jell All Natural Lite pectin  [or  3 Tablespoons Ball Low Sugar Pectin]
• 1 1/2 cups maple syrup
• 1/4 tsp cardamom

Mix the peaches lemon juice and pectin in a large pot.   Bring to hard rolling boil, stirring constantly.  Boil hard for 1 minute.    Add maple syrup and cardamom.  Stir well and bring back to hard rolling boil, stirring constantly.   Boil hard for 1 minute.   Ladle into jars and process 10 minutes for canning.  Yield 3 pints. 

Note:  I picked up the Dutch Jell All Natural Lite pectin at my local Amish store [Freedom Country Store in Freedom, Indiana].   I like that it comes in bulk.   It gels very well - almost too well.   I'm going to use it with other fruit and let you know how I feel about it later in the season.

Not Your Grandma's Spiced Peaches, Part 1: Ginger Peach Jam

It's peach season here.

For the past couple of years we've had access to the peaches on a friend's tree.  This means that we spend days and days peeling and pitting peaches.

And then we spend months and months enjoying peaches in smoothies, pies, jams, etc.

God bless generous friends with peach trees!  Thank you!!

With all those peaches, I decided to do some experimenting with spices in my peach jams this year and I came up with some really great recipes.

Really.  Great.

As in - the finished products are likely to cause you to break out in the singing of spontaneous Halleluias.  I'm totally not kidding.   

These are not your grandma's spiced peaches.

This is what I made:

• Ginger Peach Jam
• Peach Chai Jam
• Peach Maple Cardamom Jam

So, over the next few days, I'll give you the details.

The delicious, mouth-watering, halleluia inspiring details.  

I'll start here with the simplest of the spiced jams.  Ginger Peach Jam is made with chopped candied ginger.  If you make the candied ginger yourself, then you can use your ginger sugar for this jam.    It's really good!   So good, that you just might consider trying to make some.

Ginger Peach Jam

• 4 cups peaches
• 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
• 1/3 cup Dutch Jell All Natural Lite Pectin OR 3 Tablespoons Ball Low Sugar Pectin
• 1/3 cup chopped crystallized ginger
• 1 cup ginger sugar
• 1 cup white sugar

Mix the peaches lemon juice and pectin in a large pot.   Bring to hard rolling boil, stirring constantly.  Boil hard for 1 minute.    Add sugars and ginger.  Stir well and bring back to hard rolling boil, stirring constantly.   Boil hard for 1 minute.   Ladle into jars and process 10 minutes for canning.  Yield ~3 pints

Note:  If you don't make your own crystallized ginger, try to get it from a bulk store and then make sure you collect about a cup's worth of the sugar that falls off the ginger and collects in the bottom of the bin.   If you don't have access to ginger sugar, don't worry about it.   Use 2 cups of plain white sugar.  It'll still be great.

Did you know...

that maple sap comes down from the leaves and twigs, not up from the roots.    When you cut a maple tree down, it will ooze from the top that was cut off, not the stump.  

The time to tap trees is when it is freezing at night and above freezing during the day.    

Maple sapwood is different from most other trees.   In all trees, the sapwood consists of tiny water conduits that move water up from the root to the rest of the tree.  Surrounding the conduits are billions of tiny cells:  live tree cells and dead wood cells.  In most trees, the dead wood cells are full of water, but in maple trees, they're full of gas.  When the sap starts to freeze, frost forms on the insides of the gas filled cells - like frost on the inside of your windows on very cold nights. The gas inside the cell is compressed. As the frost forms on the insides of those cells, it pulls water from the water conduits, which forces more water up the tree.    When the temperature goes up during the day, the frost melts and is forced out of the gas-filled cells and pulled down the tree by gravity.   That is sap.

Source:  Melvin Tyree.   Maple Syrup Journal 4(1): 10-11. 



We tap our trees with taps like these.   

Tapping Time

The winter has been mild and we're tapping early this year.    My goal is to collect 20 gallons off the two trees that we're tapping.    That'll give us 1/2 gallon of syrup.  Enough for pancakes and waffles and jam and more jam and soup. 

Mmmmm.   I can't wait.

See this post for a look at how we tap.