Maple Season

Yummy!  I can taste it already or I can't wait to taste it, either way its just so delicious.  And after 3 years of making it in the "new" sap house you can definitely smell it in there.  The sap house is not heated and one of its walls is literally still plastic but for some reason you can go in there and it just smells so sweet and delicious and makes me want french toast with Maple Syrup on it....... 

The "New" sap house

.....It is also the smell that tipped me over the edge as to whether or not to make syrup this year.   With the kids getting older and us needing to be places all the time things have gotten busy for the Bull family.  I now work a few days a week and the Hubby never stops working so squeezing in Maple Season was a question of do we want to do it or not?  Well, of course we want to do it so I guess it more of a can we squeeze it in or not?   I was on the verge of saying we are not doing it this year and making up all the excuses to talk myself out of doing it.  Like we don't need to do it this year we have enough left from last year to get us though till next year.  Or we can take a break from it and do it next year and all other rationalizations to justify not doing it.  Then about a week before Mother Nature said it Maple Season I walked into the Sap House, I don't even know why just because it was that time of year I guess.  That delicious smell was there even after a year it was still there.  That was it at that point when I knew we would at least have to make a little this year.  So the Hubby and I talked it over and of course at that point I was all for making some  you know because of all the rationalizations like its so healthy for us, and if we don't make it we might not have enough to supply the person who sells it for us and even more importantly like the kids would miss out on licking the last little bits off the spoon when we empty out the sap pans.  Oh yeah and we would not be able to sample the sap straight out of the tree or have Sap Cicles (frozen sap) and Maple Peanuts if we have extra syrup left we can make them and they are so delicious.   All of which will be great memories for my kids to look back on <3

I'm not even going to lie I sampled the sap the first day we tapped and soon as I snapped that photo I ate the deliciously, yummy sap icicle pictured above and it was just as good as I knew it would be.
So needless to say here we go making Maple Syrup again.  I'm so glad I walked in there that day.  Now I cant wait till we are cooking it again and we can walk into the sap house to the smell of sap steaming away.
So here we are a few days into this years Maple Season and we are right back with all our taps in the trees (more then we need lol) the sap lines are run and dripping.  The firewood is getting split and piled up.  Sometime later today I will go out and make our first Sap Collection of the year and all that work will be worth it.  We might not have time for Maple Season but its the one thing we all love this time of year so we are going to do it anyway.