We made maple sugar yesterday. It is very good. First you boil maple sap to syrup. Then you strain it to get the sugar sand out. Then you boil it some more. You take the scum off as you boil it. You boil it for a long long time, till it gets to almost 300 degrees!

Then Daddy stirred it with a heavy spoon. Be careful, you might get burnt! It starts crystallizing and you get more and more maple sugar. Keep stirring until it lightens up and looks like sugar 🙂

Pour the sugar through a strainer. Keep the big pieces for candy or grind them up in a blender. Use the smaller pieces for tea or cookies!

Here are the pictures so you can see how it looks as it changes.

We finished another batch of Maple Syrup!  We have over a gallon of fresh syrup canned.

The sap has been going very slowly the last few days. The weather is too cold for the sap to run.  We are hoping for a lot more sap because we want to make the next batch into lots of sugar because it tastes great!

I like snow ice cream. Momma let us make some today before lunch. Here is the recipe.

• Lots of fresh, clean snow
• Some half and half (or cream)
• Some sugar
• And some chocolate (like hot chocolate mix)

Mix well. Eat and enjoy!

I like it. It is very good.

I like “Rotten Tea”.  One day I was making a tea mix. I accidentally called it Rotten Tea instead of Russian Tea. Everybody laughed and the name stuck!

We have changed the original recipe.  Uncle Joe likes it with more spices, so we added some.  Momma doesn’t like the stuff in Koolaid, so we changed that. Momma doesn’t like Tang much either, but we can’t find something to change it with.

I like Rotten Tea very much. After we go outside to play, it is very very good.

Recipe:
1 cup Tang
+/- 2 cups sugar
2 (3 oz) packages Lemonaid mix (like Kool-aid or Wylers) Or 6 packages True Lemon (about 3⁄4 tsp total)
1/2 cup instant tea without sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
+/- 1 1/2 tsp ground cloves
+/-1 tsp allspice (opt)
+/- 1 tsp nutmeg (opt)

Mix ingredients well.  Store in airtight container.  Use about 3 tsp mix with hot water for each cup.  Experiment to get the taste you like!

I made acorn cookies. They were good. If you want to try them, the recipe is at the end.

Recipe:

• Favorite sugar cookie recipe
• Hershey Kisses
• Favorite Chocolate Frosting
• Favorite peanut butter chips

1. Cut the cookie dough into small circles, about 1 inch across.  Or cheat and use Nilla Wafers.
2. Dunk a Kiss in frosting and put on flat side of cookie.
3. Dunk a peanut butter chip in frosting and place in middle of other side of cookie
4. Eat. Repeat once.
5. If you keep eating them, you will get sick, so save the new ones to harden up and to share with friends.

Yesterday, we made noodles for our chicken noodle soup. Megan helped too. This was the first time I made it from beginning to end.

First Momma makes the dough. She used flour, water, eggs and oil. If there  is like about a big chuck of dough like a basketball, it will probably fill a big bowl, because it makes a LOT. Then we have to let it sit. Then get out our rolling thing.  (Momma said that Grandma used to use the noodle maker to make noodles with her when she was little.) Then take some of the dough, if you have a lot, it will be very long and you will probably have to cut into a few pieces. If you take a piece a little bigger than a golf ball you will only have to cut it in half.

Then put into the bigger opening to roll it.  You roll it thinner and thinner until it is as thin as it can get. Then you move the handle up to one of the cutting things. If you want big noodles, use the big one. We wanted small so used the last one.  Then you put it into boiling water. Mix it until the noodles float up to the top. As soon as they float to the top, you take them out and put them in a BIG bowl. Add some salt and garlic with butter to help then taste better and not stick so much. Then we added a little broth.  Don’t use too much broth or the noodles will soak it up and fall apart.

If you want to make rainbow kind, make three batches of dough. Leave one plain, in one put in some cooked mashed carrots and the other one put in cooked spinach 🙂  Put it all together in one big bowl and mix it.

Then, you EAT IT!

Next time, I want to make really thick noodles.