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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Pancake Tuesday!

     Some call it Mardi Gras, Some call it Fat Tuesday, some call it Fasnacht, but at home in upstate New York, when I was a kid we called it Pancake Tuesday.  As part of a Lenten tradition the day before Ash Wednesday was a day of feasting.  It was also the day we got to have breakfast for supper!  Pancakes!  Sometimes with sausages; sometimes with bacon.
     As the mother of seven kids, Mom spent a lot of time at the stove that evening flipping pancakes while we sat at the kitchen table and gobbled them up.  Butter.  Sour cream in big globs.  And Maple syrup poured in great streams onto pancake after pancake.  We were hungry kids!
     My Dad tapped our great big maple tree - the one in the backyard, the oldest tree in town - and netted just enough maple syrup for our feast.  He would stay up all night while it boiled to a syrup on our kitchen stove.  Our windows would be covered in steam.  The cupboard doors would warp and the ceiling tiles would arch.  So what?  It was sugar time!
     It occurs to me that one of the reasons why the people of upstate New York call Shrove Tuesday, "Pancake Tuesday," is because that is the season of maple syrup - sugar! - and a most welcome feast for the people of the north country who still have a ways to go before spring.

Here's my recipe for homemade pancakes (I never use a mix - not even Bisquik)
1 C flour
3 T fat of some sort (Lard, butter, oil...)
3 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 fresh egg from a happy chicken
1 C milk.
Blend flour, baking powder and salt.  Cut in fat.  Add egg and milk.  Stir but not too much.  You want it lumpy.  Fry in a fairly hot frying pan that has been greased with fat (I use bacon drippings)

Great day to do the wash AND boil sap!

     The temperature is going into the fifties today and there is a stiff breeze blowing.  It's a great day to do the wash and hang it outside to dry.
     I plugged up the silver maple that is in our front yard because it has budded.  This particular maple tree always buds early.  Its sap now smells woody.  Time for me to quit pestering that tree and let it do its thing and let it get on to leafing out.  However, the sugar maples that are down by the creek generally bud late, not for a couple weeks yet as long as cold nights hold out for a spell.  I tapped three more trees down there and already the jugs each have about a quart of sap in them.
     I will be boiling sap again tonight (already boiled down two gallons this morning) as well as working on re-writes of my novel.  Oh, I'll also be folding laundry.
     So far I have a quart and a half of syrup in the refrigerator. 

My chickens drive me insane!

     Okay, so here's how it goes.  For the past whatever many years that I've had chickens, in the winter I have had to supliment their free-running feeding with crack corn and mash to keep them happy.  And they are.  The price of this suppliment has increased greatly to around $12 for 50 pounds.  So my hens are giving us six eggs a day.  I've pickled and frozen them but that's still way more than we'd eat in a month of Sundays.  So I found some buyers for great eggs from happy, free-running, sometimes supplimented chickens which should at least cover the cost of the extra feed.  I sell thenm for $1 a dozen - way less that the gorcedy store sells their eggs from not so happy chickens.  But sure enough.  I get buyers sell eggs for two weeks and now the hens get broody.  Now they just want to sit on their eggs.  Well, I wasn't born yesterday and I could see that one coming up Sixth Avenue.
     I'll mark one or two eggs with a magic marker and let the hens sit and hatch those but will snatch any other newbies from the nest.