Where maple sugar comes from

This weekend I decided that as a lifelong resident of Ontario, having lived under maple trees for pretty much the duration and being more than fond of pancakes, I needed to see for myself what maple syrup looks like when it's really new.

Any time this sort of urge descends upon me I hit up some friends to come along, and somehow even in the depths of summer Sio and I, alone of the group, freeze.  One time we had to talk each other out of buying silk shawls in some 19th century castle's gift shop because it was August for crying out loud.  Unseasonably cold and rainy, but August.

This time I was determined not to mess up.  The temperature was hovering just over the freezing point as I left the house and the sky threatened rain or worse, so I put wool/mohair socks inside my rubber boots, two layers on my legs plus a skirt, a giant wool sweater and scarf, and a wool hat with my raincoat. 

I was glad of the rubber boots.

(Sio begged off by the way, claiming to have too much laundry for gallivanting.  I bet she was warm.)

There are four kinds of maple trees.

I think the one in front of my current house is a sugar.  I grew up with two reds.  Mum didn't realize how big they'd grow when she planted them, and a subsequent owner of our house had to cut one down to save the other (and have natural light in the living room, and get any free time at all from raking leaves every autumn I expect.)

The idea is to tap the trees when the sap starts running in early spring, and catch said sap in something or other.  One of the more picturesque approaches is a pail.

The sap is quite clear and beautiful.

Also in evidence at the park I visited: the more modern method

which eliminates the risk of overflow and protects the sap from marauding raccoons. 

Either way, you have to boil it down.

This is the part that prevents sensible people from tapping the maple trees on their own lawns even if they aren't growing on the municipally-owned portion of same.  I mean, you've got to get the sap down to about a 40th of its original volume to get to syrup, which is a lot of steam, and I say this with confidence because the one guy I know who did once tap his own trees made his wife really, really mad when he boiled the sap in their kitchen.  She had to rehang all the wallpaper.  Hence the 'once'.

(the syrup was delicious though.)

You can get maple syrup in different grades depending on how much water has been boiled off the sap.  There's a brownish fluid that resembles syrup but pours like water, and there's something sweeter and  little denser that says With Real Maple Syrup on the label, meaning just a whiff probably, and there's high quality maple syrup from Quebec that is a rich lustrous brown and glugs out of the bottle or can, and there's my friend's syrup that took down the wallpaper, and then there is the sample they gave us on the trail. 

It only took about 113 seconds for this stuff to hit my bloodstream.  I'm amazed it was still liquid, there was so much sugar in that cup.

There was more of the same for sale in the Sugar Shack.

But my preference was for something with not much liquid left in it at all because

who can resist maple leaves made from maple sugar?

Lime marmalade

A while ago Melissa at tiny happy made a passing remark about having lime marmalade on something or other, and while I seem to recall the point of this being the something or other I stopped in my tracks at the lime.

Lime?

In my world, there is only orange marmalade. My mother likes it, so there was usually some in the house when I was growing up and I tried it once.  It was bitter.  There were huge hunks of orange peel in it that stuck to my teeth and were just all wrong, consistency-wise, for a cheery little piece of toast. Admittedly my mother likes tea that pours out like ink, so on reflection I suppose it's possible that other brands of orange marmalade might be less bitter, but still. Marmalade = ew.

Yet there was Melissa liking marmalade, and it was lime, so obviously I had to get some.  I mean, I live in a pretty big city and we do import things.  Surely I should be able to find lime marmalade?

It seemed not, for several months as I haunted different posh grocery shops.  But last week, the nearest one suddenly had: lime marmalade with ginger, lime marmalade fine cut, lime marmalade.  I went for Fine Cut, remembering those hunks of orange peel.

It is heaven.

I might even go back and get the regular kind.  But not the With Ginger.  I mean honestly.  Ginger and Lime?

Happy birthday to me

Yesterday, in honour of it being my last day at the age I've been for the past year, I took advantage of not getting Rob's first slot of the day for the haircut I've been trying to fit in since November and got myself into my favourite French cafe for the first time since I think 2003.

Twenty years ago when I lived near it and went every Saturday, I would very occasionally take a vacation from my office job to stay home and write fiction.  And at some point during the day I would go over to drink cafe au lait in a bowl and listen to grownup arty professional types having their business meetings there under cover of the always-fabulous jazz music.  Every time, I promised myself that some day I'd be in some arty line of work that would allow me to go there in the middle of the day, just like them.

So yesterday it was pretty great to sit at a marble table with my cafe au lait in a bowl, and the draft copy to review of another knitting pattern I wrote that's due to be published in a few months' time, and a pineapple danish at my side, which was just way too sticky to eat while holding a pen over paper but I ate it anyway because there is Nothing. Better. than a custard danish with a slice of pineapple on it.  See?

And this time when I listened to the grownup arty professional types - who still seemed to be the same amount older than me without actually being the same people, which struck me as more than a little time-warpy - I thought: I am really happy with my life just the way it is.

That's a pretty nice feeling to have, especially the day before your birthday, don't you think?

Tough to top on the actual day.

Unless of course you can't decide on a birthday cake

and opt to have them all.

Spot the bedding

Yesterday I had to go to the fabric store to buy buttons

(newsflash: it is in fact possible to have the most stash buttons of your entire family put together plus the stash of at least five of your crafty friends and still need to spend $20 on retail-store buttons)

and spotted some denim ends in a bin for $4/meter.  Substitute yard for meter if you like, it'll do for this story.

Though I usually try to resist such indulgences when using public transit, I just happened to be carrying a much bigger bag than buttons typically require, so I bought about $7 worth of a lovely dark grey and headed home, where I immediately spotted a pillowcase on my stash fabric shelf with a shade of blue that comes pretty close to matching a blue crochet doily I've been wanting to use for something.

Then Michelle asked whether I want to meet up for coffee next week.  Aha! Michelle's birthday is in March.  A built-in excuse to drop everything and make a tote bag with the pillowcase for lining and the blue doily for an accent.

Of course, once I wanted it I couldn't find the blue.  But I did find a nice white one I'd been hoarding.

And then I did find the blue after all.

I gave both of them big roomy inside pockets - the white bag's being sourced from a sheet, not a pillowcase.

 

Both of these have been imagined as market bags - box bottomed, and deep yet narrow enough to hold the better part of a baguette from any of the nice bakeries on the high street.  Michelle doesn't actually use that high street any more, having moved a few neighbourhoods over, but I don't care, I will picture her carrying a baguette in her bag before visiting the butcher's and the fruit and veg store anyway.

A tougher call: which one do I give her?

Saved by walnut cookies

Last week I got food poisoning and spent about 36 hours either asleep or wishing my stomach would be transplanted into a lake approximately 487 miles due west of my then-present position.  About 20 hours in, my friend Rosa happened to delivered cookies in lieu of the ones she wanted to make me at Christmas but was too sick for, herself.

 

Don't they look just like walnuts?

When I got past the soda cracker stage, I gave in to the illusion that they might be mostly protein without too much fat and tried one.

It wasn't sweet. It was actually pretty much like eating a walnut but with the texture of a soft biscuit.  I imagined being well and drinking coffee at Rosa's (Rosa makes wicked coffee too, and I say that without even liking coffee under normal circumstances) and eating these cookies; they would be perfect together.

Over the next few days I ate a few more, gingerly and then less so as things started to settle down.  They totally took the sting out of not being able to face chocolate even though I was miserable and wanted comfort food.  Treated as dessert, they made plain boiled eggs seem like a sumptuous lunch.

I guessed that Rosa has a walnut-shaped cookie mold and pressed in some walnutty dough to get each shell, then pasted them together with the walnutty filling (I asked her today: I was right.)  I thought about acquiring such a mold myself.  I wondered whether she'd give me the recipe.  I decided that I want to recuperate with walnut cookies next time I get food poisoning, which I hope will be never.

Finally I thought I'd better take a picture before they were all gone.  And now that they are I'm glad I did, aren't you?

Waiting

I thrifted some new sweaters last week, including this one:

Normally I would pass on something with this sort of embellishment over the front but, um... 100% cashmere, people.  For $6. I could not say no.  Bonus: it felted beautifully.

I have removed the cowl neck for use as a cowl (it is awesome) and

I have removed the sleeves to see whether it would work as a vest and

it fits me perfectly. 

I'm going to hold out for the perfect black merino sweater, cuffed or otherwise, and then I will cut the remains of this sweater in two for an empire waist and finish the neck and arms with a discreet run of handstitching or maybe black merino as seam binding, what do you think?  Then I will turn the merino upside down and stitch it to the cut line for a floaty vesty thing.  I'd go for a minidress but I think hoping for that much perfect black merino is pushing it, don't you?

Meanwhile: waiting.

How to send hugs to a sick and distant friend

What do you do for someone you love who's stuck in the hospital and you can't go visit?  Send a hug in blanket form, of course!

I can't take credit for this idea but I did do the sewing and can attest to its being a super easy project if you have the materials handy, in this case mostly leftover polar fleece though I was told a sheet would do. 

The friends with hugs to send each chose their own super soft felted wool from my embarrassingly large stash and traced one of their handprints onto scrap paper.  I cut two facing prints for each, pointed the lowest pair of hands downward - woolly fingers ready to be clasped - and turned the ones on the shoulders to the back for a hug.

And then I stitched them on and sent the blanket on its way, where I hope it's doing a whole lot of good.