Chanhassen Syrup

 Chanhassen is a Dakota Sioux name meaning "the tree with the sweet sap" in other words the sugar maple tree.   I have been meaning to tap some sweet trees ever since moving to Chanhassen.  This year by chance I found some Maple Syrup making supplies at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum and decided this was the year.     After getting the spiles, a book on how to do it and the bags and holders I spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to identify a Sugar Maple tree in in the winter when you have no leaves.   An education session about taping sugar maples at the Landscape Arboretum gave me the confidence to give it a shot.

 Around March 24 I went out and did my best to identify and tap 4 sugar maple trees in a near by forest.  The bag holder things were cheap and work well.

 My trusty Duluth pack has worked great to carry the large items for my trips to the woods each day.

 Mazy has had a great time sprinting both to the woods and around the woods while I work.

 After a couple of weeks of no sap I tapped another big tree and monkey rigged a bucket collection system.  I was pretty sad with some crushed hope after going to see empty bags for two weeks straight.   The season was ending and my brother Heath had long ago gotten sap from his South St. Paul trees.

 Then we got that weird late snow on about 4-5-13 and I found three and a half gallons of sap from the big tree in my monkey rigged bucket.  I have since gotten about 6 more gallons from this one tree and none from the others I tapped so long ago.

 To get a cup of syrup you need about 30 cups of sap.  That is a lot of boiling down.  I tried boiling down this first three and a half gallons on the stove, in various shaped pans, on the grill and on my propane turkey fryer kind of set up in the picture above.  The big pot on the turkey fryer set up worked the best.  Tons of power to evaporate fast.   Maya says the boiling sap "smells like pancakes!"

 Once I got it down to about 4 cups I filtered it with a coffee filter and finished it inside the house on the stove ending with about 2 1/2 cups of syrup.   Not sure why the pic above looks a little cloudy but in person it was clear and beautiful.    It is syrup at 7 degrees above what pure water boils at on that day and location.  I went 9 degrees over and still think it could be a little more thick.  Things change fast at the end however and I didn't want to end up with maple sugar so I killed the boil and am very happy with the results.  Compared to store bought grade A pure Anderson brand maple syrup mine not surprisingly has a more fresh and full maple flavor.   Not to get sappy but almost a floral hint.  Since it all came from one big tree I like to think of it as "single origin" maple syrup.   My girls and I have named this tree big sweetie because I got a 20/1 sap to syrup ratio rather than a more standard 30/1.

The pancakes we used this first batch of syrup on have never tasted better.   Definitely worth the $50 or so in start up gear and 2 and a half weeks of trips to the woods.  

The last month or so

 Made Julia Childs French onion soup recipe again.  Takes much of a day but is so so good.    

 A patch of woods I often drive by that reminds me of a Charles Beck painting.  

 I raced with Steve in the Frozen Fat Forty.

 Jesse Lalonde here won the whole thing on a moonlander.  Why didn't I win the whole thing? I have a moonlander.

 We did win our division.  We also got last place and middle place in our division.
Because we showed up.

 For the win we each got a Surly T-shirt of a blood puking clown.

 Spent a few weekends looking at furniture and drapes.  Another win or was it a loss?

 Did an overnight in Afton State Park with Heath.  Pulk worked great even though there was a lot of up and down hill stuff.  Trekking poles are in my future after using Heath's to help motor up the hills.  Backpack is faster but the pulk really was nice for some of the larger sized winter gear items.

 Made french bread.

 Made Yogurt.

 Replaced this Pin on my coffee roasting drum with my new rivet tool.  How did I manage before?  Pretty much any two thin materials like metal, plastic, wood? that I can drill a hole into I can now connect with a rivet.  I always thought riveting was for "other" more fixety people.  It was both a cheap tool and is super easy to use.  

 I tapped some trees to get sap to make maple syrup.  I still don't have any sap after a week and a half and am feeling like I am the sap for thinking I could get maple syrup from a tree.  Hopefully it is just too cold still in the forest where my trees are located and it will start to flow soon.

 Made some chitterlings   This time in the pressure cooker.  Only one batch of water and 45 minutes later they were done.  Browned them up with some butter and olive oil.

Interestingly image search Chittelings on Google and I think my chitlin pics from a blog post years ago are some of the first pics.  

A few things

Ride last night with Heath along the Minnesota on the North side from 35W to Cedar.  Temp was likely just above freezing since we had a mix of snow and sleet.  Trails were fantastic.  Fast, twisty and fun.  The picks make it look much darker than it actually is with our big boy lights.  1000 lumen is more light than I needed and used less much of the time.

 I love the rapidly changing shadows of the trees as you ride at night.   The white snow gives a perfect contrast to these moving and changing shadows that often have me thinking I saw an creature.   Trails in winter change and evolve with each snow and with each riders chosen line.   I much prefer this organic development to the some of the overly managed trails in summer.

 A friendly LED on the back of my Magicshine light turns from green to blue to yellow to red telling me how much juice I have in the battery.

 On a completely unrelated note.  It is valentines day.  A few days ago Maya and I assembled the valentines day cards for her Chan Elementary preschool class.  Maya wrote her name and "friend" on about 30 cards. We then attached candy and either pencils or little bracelets.  Maya was extremely proud that she could spell friend by the end of the card making.  I continue to mix up the i and e.

 Big annual book fare thing at the Chan high school.  Maya loves to hug characters like this one.  I can only assume it is an awkward looking cousin of Grover.

Super Cat Stove with Wind Screen/ Twig stove

 Super Cat stove project.  

 A guy named Jim Wood created a stove from a cat food can in about 2005.  It has become very popular in the ultra light backpacking world.  You just punch about 30 holes like I did above in an aluminum 3oz cat food can, put about an ounce of denatured alcohol in it and you have a stove.  Most single hole hand paper punches do a great job making the holes.  In about a minute the alcohol sort of boils.  A pot seals the top and the gas becomes somewhat pressurized shooting hot blue flames out the side.

Most backpacking cooking involves just boiling about two cups of water to mix with dehydrated food and this stove does a great job at that in 4-6 minutes.  I have been making a lot of Ramen noodles "testing" the device in my shop each night.

 The stove works so well I have used it a few times for other purposes like making coffee in my Cona vacuum brewer.

Heat sources have been a problem with this brewer in the past but no more.  

Wind is the big issue with most backpacking stoves and this is especially true of alcohol burning stoves.  Most wind won't blow the fire out but it will take the flame and all heat away from your pot.  To use the stove outside an integrated wind screen is essential.  The pic below is a competed wind screen I made. 

The wind screen has a few essential features.  

It has one rectangular hole in front on the bottom to let air in, the supercat stove is elevated inside to prevent incoming air from effecting it and it has a cut out for the pot handle to keep them cool.  The cup I will use with this wind screen is a Snow Peak titanium trek 700 mug that holds between 3 and 4 cups of water.   You can easily make a screen to fit any pot you have.  

This version of mine is very close to Jim Woods original version.   He deserves the credit for most of the ideas here.   

 6 inch aluminum roof flashing.  It weighs very little, cuts with scissors and isn't super sharp like sheet metal often is after cutting it.

 Measure it around the pot you are likely to use with the wind screen.  Leave about a half inch around the pot.

 Air hole is an inch high and one and a half inches wide.  In the pic above I have cut the air hole sides with scissors then by just folding the metal up a couple of times it will snap off cleanly.  I don't cut corners.  The handle hole should be cut in a way to keep the pot handle of your particular pot out of the fire.  Each pot will need a different size and shape hole.

 I am using three holes and some stainless screws and nuts to keep it together.  Pop rivets are a good permanent solution, wing nuts would be easy to take it apart for travel.  For some unkown reason I have the wind screen upside down in the pic showing the screw heads.  I used a drill to make the holes.  The metal over laps about 5/8ths of an inch.  I used an awl in the metal first to make sure the drill started where I intended it to start.

 The stove needs to be elevated above the air hole.  I found some aluminum gutter cover mesh in the garage and it works great as a platform for the stove.

 The bike spokes go through the wind screen about 3 centimeters up to hold the mesh material that holds the supercat stove.

 Here it is in place.  See below how the spokes are going through the wind screen under the mesh.  You could use titanium tent stakes or an old coat hanger instead of spokes.  Part of the fun of this project was using what I already happen to have at home.

 Note the little holes up higher.  If you put additional spokes in those you could build a little twig fire or put an esbit tablet on the aluminum mesh grate and then have your pot on the top spokes.  It just takes a hand full of  small twigs to boil some water.

 Here is how the stove sits in the wind screen.

 Pour in and light an ounce or so of denatured alcohol or alternately Heet fuel treatment (but use only the kind in the yellow bottle).  Wait about a minute for the fuel to get hot and cook away.

It is hard to see but I also made an optional heat reflector/ground protector out of some of the sheet aluminum to sit under the wind screen.

 In addition to the alcohol stove you can use this wind screen set up to cook over a  twig fire, use fire starters or Esbit tablets for fuel.  Lots of versatility in a stove/wind screen that weighs just a few ounces.   

Some random events

 Ella and I went to the "ice castle" thing by Ikea.  I hope it is better at night with the lights and all because what you see here is 90% of how interesting it was.  $16 for the two of us to spend 5 minutes was a little disappointing.   Ella was convinced that it wasn't really ice but rather just plastic.   I am guessing if they made it out of plastic it would have sucked less.   

Got Ella some skates and she learned how to skate on a neighbor hood pond with some friends.

After going to a DNA talk last year I have been thinking about where my people originally came from so I ordered a Genographic project kit to test my DNA.  It will be able to tell me all of my ancestry and the path out of Africa so long ago.   It will tell me all the areas of the world my ancestors have come from and what percentage of me is from each region.  It will show a map of how my ancestors exited Africa so long ago.

What I am most interested in however is how much cave man I am if any.  

"Included in the markers we will test for is a subset that scientists have recently determined to be from our hominin cousins, Neanderthals and the newly discovered Denisovans, who split from our lineage around 500,000 years ago. As modern humans were first migrating out of Africa more than 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals and Denisovans were still alive and well in Eurasia. It seems that our ancestors met, leaving a small genetic trace of these ancient relatives in our DNA. With Geno 2.0, you will learn if you have any Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA in your genome."   

I got some very hard to see Nalgene bottle cozies from Granit Gear.  They call them aquatherms.  It should keep my water from freezing.  I wonder if I could put a hand warmer safely under the bottle in the cozy? 

I went to a Wei Ya Festival event at Heath's and had gua bao and hot pot with a sauce made with some of the above ingredients.  I need to find out how to make this sauce.  I keep thinking about it.