Dinner Roasting on an Open Fire

Week two of maple sugaring is in the books. It was a quick boil today, since we didn’t have all that much sap this week. What we did have was partially frozen this morning, which makes it even faster to process. Unless it’s sub-zero, sugar won’t freeze, so you just toss away the bits of ice that have formed — it amounts to the same thing as boiling, since nature has separated out the sugar, just with cold instead of heat. 

Anyway, we used the coals of our fire to make dinner:

Notice that we’re all holding our hands way off to the side: That fire is hot. 

Dinner featured a remarkably summery spread made of our winter vegetables. The hot dogs are garnished with homemade, canned dill relish and tomato ketchup. We still have red and white potatoes for frying (though we’ll have to take an inventory before we eat any more to make sure we have enough seed potatoes left for spring planting). There’s also coleslaw from one of our storage cabbages, garnished with a bit of carrot (of which there are still a few in the cold frame). 

So far this winter we haven’t run out of any vegetables, and it looks like we’ll be in good shape to last until new things grow in another month or so. Spring is just three weeks away!