So it has actually been a few weeks since I have posted anything and I sincerely apologize! Bad Selina! While I have been super busy I have still been jotting down blog posts and ideas in margins of pages and on scrap pieces of loose leaf. I find that I am a super descriptive writer and I am working on trying to create short and sweet posts rather than long and sweet posts. We’ll see how that goes and if anyone out there has an opinion of what you would like to experience in my posts, please let me know!
Anyway, I have been meaning to type this and post it for a while now. A group of friends and I recently went to Sugar Moon Farm. Sugar Moon is located in the Cobequid Hills in Earltown Nova Scotia. It takes about an hour and a half to get there from Halifax. When we first arrived we knew we were there before we saw the farm because there were cars lined up on both sides of the road- the surplus that could not fit into the parking lot. We turned up the driveway anyway and did manage to find parking. The main building is one story tall and quite long. It houses a small maple museum, the boiler room, and the pancake house.
Sugar Moon is the trailhead for the Rogart Mountain Trail- a 6.2 km loop that begins and ends in the parking lot. They also have a shorter hike into the sugar bush to see the old sugar shack and to see the tapping lines strung through the forest. The farm offers sugar tours on site to show how they make maple syrup. When we were there the weather was just too cold and so there was no sap flowing and the boiler was not in operation. But it was still impressive to see the boiler and learn how the process works. Sugar Moons maple sap runs into the large metal sap pans and then gets boiled in a wood fired evaporator until it reaches 66% concentration before being ready to bottle and serve.
While our group of six waited for the tour we heard rumours of a two hour wait time for a table in the pancake house. We hadn’t fully decided if we were going to eat there or not, but this made us wonder how good it must be and how willing we were to wait for a seat in the restaurant. After the tour we decided to check the wait time and put our name in for a table. How could we possibly pass up the opportunity to eat somewhere new and have super fresh maple products at our beck and call? We put our name in and had only a 30 minute wait. We had just enough time to take the short hike up to the old sugar shack and come back down before lunch.
When we got to the bottom of the hill we had just enough time to warm our hands over the enormous wood stove, browse the brochures and books, and drool over the shelves of maple products for sale before our table was ready. The Sugar Moon pancake house menu seems small but it actually gives a lot of choice. No matter how you order them, the pancakes are all you can eat. The menu also boasts three different types of sausage, baked beans, hot cereal and granola as well as a plethora of beverage options. Most chose straight up pancakes or the Sugar Moon Special- all you can eat pancakes, your choice of sausage (Smoked Westphalian, German Bratwurst, or Breakfast Links) and a pile of house made maple baked beans. This was my choice. I also got the Sugar Moon Coffee- a cup of delicious hot fair trade organic java topped with maple whipped cream and maple sugar. They were even kind enough to make egg and dairy free pancakes for my meat-fasting friend.
While we waited for our meals we were served fresh made biscuits and maple butter. The biscuits were fluffy and tender and the maple sugar is like smooth maple frosting- minus any added white processed sugar or other ingredients. Just maple. Just fantastically decadent and delicious.
The pancakes are made with red fife wheat and buttermilk. They have a texture unlike any I have experienced in a pancake before and I attribute that to the wheat and the buttermilk working together I guess. I normally like a dense and spongy pancake when I make them at home, but these red fife buttermilk pancakes were fluffy, but not too fluffy, and not too dry, and they didn’t absorb all of the maple syrup. It’s a pet peeve of mine to have pancakes that suck up all the syrup and still be bland and dry and crumbly.
Next to the divine pancakes was the smoked westphalian sausage that I chose. It was juicy and flavourful and cooked to perfection. It tasted wonderful on its own but then I tried it smeared with Embers Maple Mustard. I instantly knew that a jar or two of the maple mustard would be coming home with me. The baked beans were creamy and sweet and tangy at the same time (a texture/flavour combination I have never achieved in multiple failed attempts to make good baked beans).
It didn’t matter if your mustard and sausage slipped into your baked beans or if the beans dribbled onto the pancakes because every flavour was complimentary to the next and mixed together they became a mysteriously succulent-sweet mish-mash. An adventure on my tongue!
After we finished our lunch, I resisted the urge to clean out the store of the maple products and settled instead on a litre of maple syrup, a small tub of maple butter, a jar of maple mustard with peppercorns, and six maple filled chocolates.
We then went outside and mulled around while we waited for dessert. I was stuffed but I absolutely could not resist a traditional maple farm treat- maple on snow. The staff at Sugar Moon has troughs of pure white perfect snow, and they boil a small batch of syrup at a time until it reaches just the right consistency before ladling careful lines of hot sticky maple onto the snow. Everyone who pays a toonie gets to grab a popsicle stick and gather round the snow to roll up their cooling treat. And after the feast of maple you just had, and the smells and aromas inside and outside at Sugar Moon, you expect it to be good. But if you are like me and have never had maple sugar on snow… it will blow you AWAY. It’s like a sucker that hasn’t completely hardened yet. It’s not quite bubble gum and it’s not quite caramel or toffee. As you are rolling up your maple treat the top layer of snowflakes sticks to the bottom layer of your maple and gets stuck in little pockets between the layers of sugar. These little pockets become melt-y maple caves filled with cold water that tastes like maple-y wonderfulness. Possibly the best drink of water you ever had.
My visit to Sugar Moon prompted me to research and play with various recipes using maple products. I will share them in my next post to make them easier to access. If I haven’t inspired you yet to visit Sugar Moon or at the very least play with maple in your own kitchen, and even if I have, I strongly STRONGLY recommend you take the trip to Sugar Moon Farm. If you need more convincing, check out their website at Sugar Moon or their menu at Sugar Moon Menu . Happy Eating!
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