Saturday's boil yielded 1 3/4 gallons -- with a jar going to a friend who donated a little sap. I'm loving boiling this year -- we're finally getting it down to a science.

Bob made homemade hash tonight - and we had toasted wheat bread with eggs and hash.

Homemade hash -- 1 lb of corned beef from our cows -- processed in the food processor and fried in a pan with sweet onion, red pepper, potato dice from precooked potatoes, half and half, a little thyme, cayenne, and garlic.

Homemade wheat bread -- 2 cups white whole wheat, 1 cup unbleached flour, 2 tsp instant

maple glazed baked pork chops

I took 1 cup of maple syrup, 1/2 cup of ketchup, 2 tablespoons of mustard, 2 tablespoons of worcestershire - and whipped it together. I slathered 8 loin pork chops in a roasting pan with the glaze. Baked for 30 minutes in 350F oven -- mmmmmmmm.

While working on the boil yesterday - I also worked on the taxes, some of my regular work, and errands - I just set the timer to check the outside operation every 20 minutes. I also made bread and roasted one of the  chickens we raised last summer, serving it for dinner with homefries and steamed snow peas. It felt great to get so much done.

Tonight we'll have pork chops, which i might search

Maple Syrup time - timeline of one boil

We started the fire yesterday at noon, and at 2am I had finished a gallon and a quarter of grade a maple syrup. 1" of depth in our pan is 6 gallons of sap. I knew I had around 44 gallons of sap and that I'd get a little more than a gallon of syrup - and by measuring the depth in the pan, I could tell how concentrated the sap was becoming. Here's the timeline --

12pm -- started fire and put 35

minestrone

I had a cow processed a couple weeks ago and so we had to make room for hundreds of pounds of beef in the chest freezer. We had a roast, a package of ground beef, a package of stew meat, and 30 pounds of spare ribs. We decided to boil the spare ribs to make a rich beef broth.

With the beef broth I made a splendid minestrone. The friends who came to help us boil last night ate a dinner of

what a gorgeous day for sugaring! We ended up finishing off yesterday's boil this morning and ended up with 1 1/2 gallons of medium grade syrup. I'm thrilled.

tapping trees

We've been so busy in our lives -- but we made some time to tap our maple trees.

Last weekend I pulled all the stuff together, washed it thoroughly, and went outside to tap the trees. We have 31 taps now - in 25 trees. We boiled last night -- a total of 70 gallons of sap we saved this week. This morning we're finishing off more than 1 1/2 gallons of syrup.