Bathos at the Olympics
February 23, 2014
Twenty years from now I wonder if anyone in Canada will talk about where he or she was during the gold medal hockey game at Sochi.
The experience was radically different during the 2010 medal game. The maple syrup crew had assembled in our living room, and we still remember our breathless anticipation leading up to Sydney Crosby’s climactic goal. We almost let the sap pan burn dry when the U.S. team tied it up and they went to overtime.
https://plus.google.com/photos/106258965296428632652/albums/5983655953647816593?banner=pwa
What does an early spring mean?
April 4, 2010
On Good Friday Bet and I strolled out the lane and stopped at the deck under the maple tree. The wood was dry and ready, so Bet swept off the winter’s dust and I hauled a set of Adirondack chairs out of storage in the barn. There we were, sitting in a pleasant breeze on a warm day – on the second of April!
I still had sap boiling in the sugar shack, but wild leeks were up in the woods. A large yellow and black butterfly had kept me company that morning as I gathered the last, cloudy sap for a batch of dark syrup. This time it was hard to keep the honey bees out of the evaporator. Spring has come suddenly this year.
Only a pessimist of the highest order can still cling to the old in-like-a-lamb, out-like-a-lion adages about March weather. Last year I kept my snow blower on the tractor well into May, but the expected final storm did not appear.
If he were around today, I wonder if Grandpa Charlie would still wear his winter woolies until the first of June? It would have been a warm day for him on Saturday in the 80 -degree weather.
Early last week Peter Smolker’s tractor started changing the colour of a field of stubble. Bob Chant’s loader and spreader were at work on the large flat behind his barn. Yesterday I transplanted walnut seedlings all morning. Conditions were perfect, so why not?
As I write this on Easter Sunday, I think back to the many times we climbed up to Spy Rock for the sunrise church service with Reverend Mary Simpson. We would spend an hour looking over village, lake and valley, then troop down the steep hill and over to the Presbyterian Church for a pancake breakfast.
The many Easter mornings blend in my memory into a single picture of the scene, but in that image the lake is still frozen solid. There’s a bit of snow on the ground under the bushes as well, though the rocks we stood or sat on were clear. This year there’s no snow, and hardly a cube of ice to be found in the whole Rideau.
Generally an Easter news story about a young man in the river entails heroic rescue or tragic loss. Yesterday the Ottawa Citizen mentioned a teen jumping into the river to retrieve an overthrown football, only to be joined for a swim by his bikini-clad girlfriend. Ah, the bathos of climate change!
If our Arctic ordeal is shrinking to a Pennsylvania-sized inconvenience, then what are the other implications of the decline of winter in Leeds County?
The maple syrup run this year seemed poor, but by Martin and Charlie’s calculations we surpassed last year’s 1 litre-per-tap standard over five weeks. Mind you in two weeks last year we had had enough of smoke, exposure and late nights, so we announced that the run had ended and pulled the taps. This year’s increased production might have as much to do with improved shelter and equipment as actual sap flow. Apparently the experience was rewarding enough for the crew to make plans for another session, though. They left everything clean and ready for an early start next February, but there’ll be some wood to get out and split before then.
Speaking of the sap crew, the guy who cut and split the most firewood, Mark Conboy, has joined the Queen’s Biology Station as assistant manager. With a Master’s in biology and solid mechanical skills, he should be a great addition to the QUBS staff at Chaffey’s Locks. Congratulations, Mark.
On Young’s Hill it has always seemed as if black walnuts could only grow on the south side in the shelter of the maple bush, but in the last couple of years they’ve popped up everywhere the squirrels have planted them. They don’t seem to need the protection of the woods any longer.
Another interesting change has to do with the sudden emergence of a market for hazel nuts as legislators have wisely chased the peanut from North American schools. The company that produces Nutella is begging Canadian farmers to plant vast acreage to help meet the demand. The bushes take only three years to mature, but the problem is the blight that wipes them out. Disease and insect pests may force other nut and fruit production northward as conditions deteriorate in the south because of climate change.
As it gets hotter, the risk of fire increases. A grass fire near Hamilton this week spread into a junk yard and burned through over a hundred wrecked cars as well as the field where it had started. As we worked in the sugar bush in the last couple of weeks we noticed how quickly things dried out, and also the amount of flammable material on the forest floor. Even though it’s only April we must take great care with vehicles and open flames in areas where fuel for a wildfire is available. Check the spark arrestors on your ATVs, lads. You don’t want to burn out your favourite trail.
Five years ago the prospect of a sugar maple on the shore of James Bay was science fiction. With a spring like this one, it doesn’t seem like such a dumb idea. The old philosophical question emerges: If you were an oak with a life expectancy of 400 years, where would you want to grow?
“You have a most civilized place to live.”
March 21, 2010
“You have a most civilized place to live.” Taking into account that he had to stand in the bed of the Ranger with three others and cling to the roll bar as the vehicle lurched through mud holes, and that lunch was a venison burger fried on a corner of the maple syrup arch, I was a little surprised when Dr. Armand Leroi made this comment to Bet and me.
On a brief visit to Kingston, Armand joined Saturday’s crew at the sugar shack along with friend and colleague, Dr. Adam Chippindale of the Queen’s Biology Department. They came to see what had been dragging so many of Adam’s students out of the lab and up Hwy 15 lately. Fourth-year biology students each year get to pick a guest lecturer for their final class. They selected Dr. Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Imperial College in London, England. His BBC4 science programs* no doubt influenced their choice.
At least those sallow moths in the sap buckets received some high-powered attention on the weekend. For an album click here. Photos:
Earlier in the week Matthew Swift arrived. Matt is a sous chef at Red’s Bistro, a restaurant in the financial district of Toronto, and has a keen interest in new approaches to local foods. He joined friend Don Kerstens, one of the sap crew, to look at the setup and taste our Canada tea.
With a hot fire rolling under the finishing pan, Martin Mallet was in his element tracking the boil until the syrup hit the proper sugar concentration. “The Brix is at 66. It’s time to take it off.” No more endless speculation and arguments: that eBay refractometer was worth the money. Martin and Matt bottled 8 litres of syrup.
Things had gone normally until they took the small pan with the syrup off the arch. Then the three foodies kept gazing at that expanse of bare, hot steel. The urge to cook had struck. In his business Don Kerstens (selectfinefoods.ca) supplies specialized meat cuts to Toronto restaurants. He happened to have some premium pork chops frozen in a cooler. Into the boiling water went the vacuum-packed chops. Too hot? Martin added two pails of cold water so as not to boil them during the defrost.
A wipe of the flat surface with a wet towel and the arch was ready for cooking. Chef Matt seasoned the “pan” by melting the fatty edges of the chops into the steel, producing a black, smooth surface. A little salad oil, and on went the chops. Matt kept feeling them with his finger, turning them frequently. Then he took them off. Martin advanced with his thermometer. “68 degrees F in the middle. They’re not cooked yet.” Unbothered, Matt waited and chatted with me about how to get syrup into the chops without burning them. After a couple of minutes he put the chops back on the stove and finished them. He later told me he likes to let pork chops rest a bit halfway through. Then he poured a bit of syrup onto each, turned them, and used his Swiss army knife to slice them into thin strips on the tray. We ate with our fingers. They were delicious: excellent meat, cooked by an expert, with very little salt and pepper added and a light maple flavour.
Red’s Bistro staff take pride in winning cooking competitions in the Toronto area with innovative entrees and appetizers. I doubt if it will be long before some combination of maple syrup and Berkshire pork makes its way onto the menu in this high-end restaurant.
Next day I tried Matt’s technique to fry a couple of Don’s chops. Even with my limited skills they were quite delightful. Premium pork may well be worth the cost, and the end of a maple syrup arch trumps a gas barbecue as a cooking surface every time.
But the highlight of the week had to be a conversation with four-year-old Liam Chippindale, visiting the farm with his father and brother. He sat down with me and explained in amazing detail how his home’s heating system works. He combined acute observation and anecdote with a fertile imagination to fill in the missing parts, but basically there’s an ice volcano outside which runs water in to provide hot air through a floor register in his room and a wall register in his brother’s. Neat kid. He invited me to his birthday party in thirty days – at an amusement park.
*You can easily find a number of Dr. Armand Leroi’s programs on You Tube: The Evolution of Music, What Makes Us Human, What Darwin Didn’t Know, Aristotle’s Lagoon. Start with What Makes Us Human.
A Very Canadian Day
February 28, 2010
The new snow had all the charm of a wet flannel shirt on a cold day. Mention of cleaning the driveway should bring visions of white, sparkling rooster tails arching to the treetops against an azure sky. What the week actually brought, however, were dull clouds and mud balls and a blower gagging out liquid snow, occasionally punctuated by a blast of gravel. There’s no satisfaction in this.
Charlie and his pals had tapped the woodlot last weekend. Of course the sap didn’t run because it was too early, but they were keen to experiment. Then on Friday it started.
So here I was with buckets overflowing in the woods and the kids coming on Sunday to make syrup. I decided I’d better pack a track around the woodlot so that they could gather with the Ranger. Two hours of work produced little gain. One area of deep slush was impassible for the tractor. Snow that you can’t pack into a road is just no good.
Then three carloads of crew showed up: Charlie, Anneli, Martin, Anne-Claire, Rob, Derek, Brian, Allison and Jeff. The sun came out and the temperature rose. Martin had acquired a large supply of 16 litre shortening pails with lids which he insisted could be installed and removed easily. He planned to gather the sap from the buckets in these containers, put the lids on, and haul them to the shanty in the back of the Ranger. Figuring I’d be soaked from slopping pails before long, I loaded Derek and Anne-Claire onto the Ranger and blasted back the crude trail to deliver the empties. The UV pawed its way over slush which had defeated the tractor. Interesting.
The crew swarmed around the maples, draining buckets into pails at a frightening pace. Where do they get the energy? Martin proved his point that the UV’s bed will hold more sap in pails than in a 50 gallon drum. They loaded them up and turned me around on the trail. Back we went to the shack to try out the new arch Peter Myers had made for us.
Fire-starter Rob laid a work of art in the cavernous firebox and set it alight. Before long the sap began to boil and we retired to the house for the 3 o’clock Gold Medal Hockey Game. We calculated that the optimum time to refill the firebox was every twenty minutes, so stokers alternated throughout the game. The arch worked very well.
Derek commented: “Here we are, boiling maple syrup, eating Tim Horton’s and watching a gold medal hockey game. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more Canadian.” Bet and Mom served a buffet during the third period.
Then the U.S. tied the game with a few seconds left.
I could taste the irony. Disasters travel in threes, right? I didn’t want #3 to be a U.S. victory, but I particularly didn’t want to have to admit that the pan burned dry because the game went into overtime. Out I went to check, and surely enough, the sap was down to ½”, a critical level. We quickly lifted the pan off the fire and returned to the game.
On our way back in to the house, Martin quipped: “If ever there was an appropriate time to let the pan run dry, it would be during overtime in a gold medal game.” But there’s never an appropriate time for that.
Surely enough, with disaster #2 averted, #3 didn’t happen, either. Crosby fired a blind shot at the net and Miller missed it. Canada had won gold.
Anne-Claire: “You couldn’t have scripted a better ending than Crosby getting the winning goal in overtime. When he was a shy teenager, I once served him a steak at The Keg in Halifax.”
Probably we’ll all remember where we were when Crosby fired the shot. We’ll have a hard time avoiding the day’s photos. Many of the crew had cameras along, and the light was good.
The kids may have tapped way too early and the snow was a drag, but we had a great afternoon. I wonder if some of them will come upon these photos in twenty or thirty years and marvel at the youth, vigour and beauty the camera captured in them on this day.
Check out Rob Ewart’s outstanding photos of the day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/4397837947/in/set-72157623383980467/
Roz and Charlie discover real food
October 11, 2009
All summer when Roz came to the farm she would spend just enough time with us to be polite, and then she would disappear. Occasional searches would turn her up in the garden, sitting or lying in a row, plucking weeds from around her cherished plants. Roz had never been around a garden until she discovered Forfar.
So this year I involved her in the seed purchases and even put up with her desire to have green beans (too much work), peas (blow over in a good breeze), and beets (yuck!). Kohlrabi and butternut squash made it into the basket as well. Roz is very fit and relentless when it comes to work. Bet and I didn’t resist when Roz read the instructions on the seed packs and methodically planted the seeds in the rows I had laid out in the garden.
This task requires more than my personal capacity for patience and bending. Other years I would stuff a package of seeds into a seeding wheel, take aim down a row and walk until the seed gave out. This could occur anywhere from three feet in to halfway to the stake at the other end. So I’d start with another packet of something from the other end. The large gaps in the middle of the rows were ideal areas for melons to spread, so it usually worked out fairly well in my tangle. I also discovered that volunteer tomatoes look much less weedy than other weeds.
This year Roz showed up each week to check on the progress of her seeds. The rain wiped out the cucumbers, tomatoes and melons, but she lovingly tended the surviving root vegetables, communing for hours with her charges, plucking the weeds from their midst with a delicate, two-fingered grip.
And then came the harvests. The girl was so delighted with her first bowl of peas that I couldn’t rain on her parade. And she didn’t mind the work of picking the string beans. But the beets! Oh man, the beets! The rest of the folks at the table were raving about these bleeding red things, and Bet had shrewdly added some feta and garlic to the mix, so I ate a few slices. The horrible-taste memory of my childhood fell away in an instant and I very much enjoyed this new food.
After losing a war with the raccoons I vowed never again to grow sweet corn. But Roz had never had a corn patch, so we put in five rows. The raccoons struck on schedule, but Tony helped me build an electric fence around the patch. It worked. We saved the rest of the crop.
Roz remembered her garden: “I enjoyed it all far more than was reasonable. I don’t know why. I love picking raspberries. Maybe it has to do with pride in something you think you have created. Even though I know it’s cheaper to buy any of those foods than my time is worth, there’s something that makes me incredibly proud when I make a dish from ingredients that I’ve grown. I confess more than once I ate beets and raspberries until I made myself sick on them, especially the raspberries. But it’s because I enjoy collecting them so much.
“At Thanksgiving dinner in Ancaster when I told Papou* about my vegetables, my grandfather immediately insisted that we make the trip to his house to see his garden before the sun went down. He does so much. He gave us eggs, figs, pears, oregano. With the language barrier when I was a little kid I never really paid attention to him, but now I wonder if there is something hereditary in the pride he takes in his self-sufficiency, because I really enjoyed the garden and I have no idea why.”
Charlie and Martin’s syrup-making exploits last March continue to reverberate in the family as we work our way through their product. I asked Charlie what possessed him to take on such a project.
“The trees were there, and the stuff costs fifteen dollars a bottle. Roz makes me pancakes on Saturday morning and she kept sending me to buy the syrup.”
Of course Charlie and Martin had many commitments during the day so they did all of the work at night. Charlie didn’t see anything particularly unusual about that. “If you only have a two week season, odds are pretty good you’ll work most of the day on it.”
I asked him to explain the essential difference between maple syrup and corn syrup, the current nutritional public enemy #1. “Syrup is a lot more expensive and dangerous. You create it by boiling something over open flames. And inherently less is produced, so it’s less fattening. There’s also something exciting about making it.”
Roz is already making plans for next year. “I found myself thinking that the peas were more work than they’re worth, so I’ll plant more beans next year. Yesterday my grandmother dismissed rutabagas as cattle feed, but I found that you can make a rutabaga pie, and even a carrot pie. You cannot, however, make kohlrabi pie, so I think we can do with fewer of them next year and more carrots.”
*This is the simplest of five or six different spellings of the Greek term of endearment for grandfather, each of which someone on the Internet claims is correct.
Ten things I have learned from a week of sugar-making
March 22, 2009
1. Young adults are night-owls. Starting work at 7:30 p.m., gathering sap by headlights and boiling all night? That seems normal for these guys. They never seem to tire. Neither do they seem aware of their host’s deep, neurotic need to watch a Senators’ game and find an early bed. What’s more, they seem ever more enthusiastic about the project, constantly planning improvements.
2. Nilex makes an outstanding filter for syrup. Martin brought this scrap of fabric from a bolt of the stuff his father used to concentrate plankton in sea water. It’s a closely-woven nylon fabric which is then pressed between two hot rollers to provide a predictable size of mesh. Used with a dinner-napkin pre-filter, it made my cheesecloth-filtered product look laughable by comparison. Yesterday Martin checked out a competitor’s product at the Kingston Market. The bottles he examined were quite cloudy. The vendor told Martin that they were having trouble getting the sugar sand out of their product with their pressure-filter system, and filtering the syrup is a big problem. I wonder if they have heard of Nilex.
3. Boiling sap over an open fire takes a lot of fuel. I’ve progressed from raiding the woodpile to collecting fallen ironwoods and cutting them into three-foot lengths. They provide a hot fire and reach well back into the arch. If a log extends too far, though, say into the end of the stove pipe, a miserable evening of smoky fire will ensue. Clay makes quite a good emergency mortar to seal up gaping holes in the “firebox”, but it doesn’t make a lot of difference if the pipe is blocked.
4. North winds are unpleasant for sap boiling. I think I see why a sugar shack would be a good investment. It’s no fun at all stoking a fire while the smoke blows back at you.
5. Some sap isn’t very sweet. Martin was astounded when he bottled the second batch. Boiled from a full drum of sap, he decanted six litres of fine, thick syrup. The previous batch produced seven litres, but we had boiled about two and a half drums of sap to get it. The early sap hadn’t tasted sweet at the tree, and I guess it wasn’t.
6. A gas barbecue isn’t much good for boiling syrup. I passed a leisurely afternoon trying to finish a small batch. The heat is all wrong for the job and when I dumped in some milk to purify the syrup, it wasn’t boiling hard enough to congeal the milk properly and I ended up with a very tasty, watery product with a great deal of sediment in the bottom of the bottles. It tasted exquisite on waffles, on the other hand. I insist that thinner syrup tastes better and soaks into pancakes with less waste than the full-strength stuff.
7. A 110,000 btu deep fryer does a great job finishing syrup. Charlie quickly discovered that “the Binford Inferno” in fact has very precise controls. With a sheet-metal wind screen, it has proven a fast and thrifty implement for the finishing of the syrup.
8. A large maple syrup expresso latte is a great deal too much of everything. With all of that tasting, tasting, tasting, my sweet tooth has gotten a real workout. Waffles several times a day aren’t so bad, but I mustn’t try thinning over-strong coffee with maple syrup ever again. It took several hours, two loads of ironwood cut and delivered, and two trailer-loads of planer shavings hauled away to burn off the sugar buzz.
9. The Polaris Ranger has a way of making itself indispensable before anyone notices. It carries the barrel to gather the sap. It hauls the firewood. It makes many trips back to the woodlot to check to see if the sap is running. The headlights are doing far more work than they should. Its relatively light weight and large tires float it over thawing turf into which a tractor would sink. It wades through puddles very well. It’s everywhere, and everyone needs it, most of the time. We learned that it’s important to check if any hoses are attached before zooming off on the next errand.
10. Syrup from the maples on Young’s Hill tastes wonderful. Back when he was persuading me to take on the syrup project, Martin sent me a couple of research documents on the use of black walnut sap for syrup production in Kentucky. In blind taste tests professionals unanimously rated regular table syrup superior to both the maple and walnut syrups produced by the crew. Perhaps Kentucky syrup just doesn’t taste very good. To illustrate my point I gave the boys a sample of some poor-quality maple syrup I found in my mother’s fridge. Their faces dropped. Then the grimmaces started. Descriptors such as “used motor oil” and “aftertaste of licorice” popped up. Nobody took a second taste. Not all syrup tastes good, but the deep red ambrosia Charlie and Martin produce in a pan over an open fire in our yard is a delight to the senses.
When do I take the pan off the fire?
March 16, 2009
UPDATE: 7 June, 2017
I’m pleased to announce that Dr. Anne-Claire Larochette and her husband Dr. Martin Mallet will join us this morning after Anne-Claire’s graduation at Queen’s before they return to their home and careers in New Brunswick.
Last February a CBC reporter interviewed A.C. on the subject of isolation during winter storms:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/ice-storm-acadian-peninsula-shelter-1.3964010
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Martin and Charlie decided to make syrup this year. They had done the setup in a couple of hurried trips to the farm jammed in between a wedding, exams, a visit to the U.S. Embassy and grad photographs. Sunday afternoon the temperature rose and so they showed up at the farm along with Martin’s fiancee, Anne-Claire, to gather the first sap.
They arrived back from the woods euphoric with a load of sap on the Ranger. “That one little gray tree had both buckets full and overflowing onto the ground, and it’s so small compared to the others!”
With little idea of how to boil the stuff but determined to learn, they ate a quick meal, gave the sap pan a final wash, and made a series of repairs to the ramshackle pile of cement blocks which had served as an arch eight years ago for my last attempt to make syrup. The blocks were frozen into the ground, of course, and accepted attempts to straighten them only reluctantly. Much improvisation and effort went into the leveling of the pan.
Everyone dashed about to locate a promising source of fuel. Charlie and Anne-Claire hauled a load from the woodlot with the Ranger and turned up with the silly grins of a pair of kids who had just discovered the bottom of a mud puddle. Martin dragged in a bunch of broken fence rails on a small trailer. I tore into the bed of an abandoned wagon with my chainsaw, narrowly missing a back tire in my effort to avoid nails and bolts.
Called upon to provide instruction in the art of maple syrup boiling, I think I did reasonably well on the building of the fire, but faltered on the climactic question: “How do I know when it’s time to take the sap off the fire?”
The best I could answer was, “You take it off when you start to feel really nervous about burning the pan.”
Martin took my words of instruction and perhaps gave them more weight than they merited. As the sun went down and he struggled to keep the fire up, I heard him mutter to himself: “The problem with doing it for the first time is that you don’t know when to get nervous.”
“When we went into the woods I was torn between two ways to think of the tapping experience: it was either an idyllic scene with buckets and sap, or one of Charlie, Anne-Claire and me sucking the life out of the forest, draining it.”
I assured him that the maples likely wouldn’t mind a few taps.
Martin’s vigil over the boiling sap was aided by a slick digital thermometer he kept near at hand. He asked at what temperature the sap becomes syrup. Neither Mom nor I could remember the precise figure, so Martin dashed into the house to check on the Internet. He came back a little discouraged. According to Google and Wikipedia, the answer isn’t at all straightforward. About all he could find out is that, “It stays at 212 degrees until all of the water is gone and then it shoots up exponentially until the pan burns.”
Mom showed an uncanny knack of turning up just when it was time to do something with the fire. Her memories of three generations of scattered sugar making efforts came out when prompted: “When my dad set up his arch he piled sod around the stones to seal in the heat.” Charlie couldn’t find any sod soft enough to shovel, so he compromised with a pile of soggy ashes Martin had shoveled out of the fire pit. This primitive mortar worked to seal up the arch and the syrup soon came to a boil. Stone age technology with digital instruments.
A grad student in clinical psychology, Anne-Claire commented, “People were bemused to hear that we were going to make maple syrup ourselves this weekend, but I am no longer surprised by the adventures that Martin gets me into. He is a born scientist, and his whole life is one experiment after another. Whenever I learn another method of making food or growing food or hunting, it makes me feel a little bit more safe. So if there was ever a time where there was no more food in the supermarket, we would still be able to survive and not be dependent upon someone else providing us with food.”
As the evening wore on around the blazing fire, our various points of view emerged on the climactic question of when to take the pan of syrup off the fire.
The psychologist pondered, while peering through the steam, “What if we are past the point of no return and don’t even know it?”
The filmmaker offered, “Let me change the light angle and see if you can see it.”
The biologist pronounced, “The experiment is not complete unless it fails once.”
The teacher yelped: “Take the pan off the fire, now!”
The unfinished syrup has a delightful flavour and the pan is still intact. Not a bad day all around, with many more to come.
the Walnut Diary 