Maple Syrup for My Birthday

This past Saturday was my birthday, so we decided to live it up.  We went out to Bruce's Mill, a conservation area that has a large Maple Syrup Festival this time of year.  It was the most beautiful day of the year so far, so not only did we have lots of fun, it was most enjoyable to be outside.

A little bit of info about maple syrup for you: the sap comes out of the tree completely clear and has only a 5% sugar content.  It used to be collected in buckets, as seen below, but now the modern more efficient method is to have tubes connecting all the trees to a main line, which carries the sap directly to the sugar shack.

It takes 24 hours of boiling for the sap to reach a 66% sugar content, which is what you want for syrup.  The below photo shows how they used to do it; using three different pots was necessary because you wouldn't want to boil sap with a 5% sugar content in the same pot that you'd just boiled syrup in.  It would burn!  Notice the third pot - it's concave.  This was a recent development in the early 1900s which helped the syrup to boil and froth in to the pot, rather than bubbling out. 

 John & I found all of this really interesting.  There's so much about our food that we just don't know!

Besides being educated on maple syrup, we petted animals, Helena had a pony ride, and we all went for a wagon ride.  Oh, and there were rocks to find, snow to tromp in, sticks and leaves to dig in, and tons of mud that we tried to avoid.

Other especially fun things we did with our rental car were made a stop at Michael's (nearly impossible to get to on public transportation), bought a huge amount of groceries (which means I won't have to push/pull all of them home), and took a gander at this Slovak Byzantine Rite Roman Catholic former cathedral.

Its construction was started in 1984, when its cornerstone was blessed by the Pope, but it is still not completed.  And it is no longer a cathedral, because the church and the church foundation that owns the property could not hold a stable relationship. 

 The day ended at Banjara Indian Cuisine with one of the most delicious Indian meals we've had and then key lime pie at home.  An absolutely fabulous day - thank you John for my great birthday!