Winter

The old saying goes, ‘If you live in Iowa and don’t like the weather, just wait a little bit and it’ll change’. Well that’s just what happened these last couple of days. We had such nice weather on Sunday and then a big storm blew in. Now we didn’t get the snow that we were thinking that we were going to get, but about 60 miles south of us, they just got dumped on. The news called it a Maverick storm – because it just did the opposite of what it was supposed to do. But I’m thinking they just made that up because first of all I’ve watched a lot of weather in my time and I’ve never heard of the term ‘Maverick’. And second of all, I think it was something that they are saying just so they don’t have to admit that they made a mistake. Oh well, either way our area only got around 8 inches of snow and no wind. Not so bad.

February looks so much better with snow in Iowa. This was taken on Sunday afternoon.

But with the snow in February also comes tapping trees for syrup. Now I’ve never done this before, but the guy who catches frogs at work also makes maple syrup. OK, this job is getting more interesting every day! So today he brought in some home made maple syrup. He said that he puts out around 24 tree taps and had some syrup from last year. He was getting ready to tap his trees again and wanted to give out his last years jars. Lucky for us!  When I showed the jar to Daryl and asked him if he knew what I brought home today, do you know what he guessed? Whisky. What?? Anyway, check it out – it looks kind of pretty. Now I’ve got some maple syrup from Canada, New York, and Fredericksburg in my kitchen cupboard. I think I better start looking for some recipes to start taste testing them.

Homemade maple syrup