Tag: Food

Maple Syrup Flavored Hot Chocolate From The Tree In Front Of My House!

This is now the third year that I have tried to harvest sap from the tree in front of our house in the middle of the City Of Saint Louis, and I finally had a tiny bit of success. Like, one quarter cup of success. We installed a sap tap on two different maple trees yesterday (Saturday, January 25th, 2025) and by today (Sunday, January 26th, 2025) had harvested 8 cups of sap. I cooked that down to about one quarter cup of maple syrup, which sure looks like almost nothing. After cooking the sap down to syrup it seemed like there was too much maple syrup still clinging to the pan so I decided to make good use of that by warming milk in that pan, which dissolved the syrup that had been solidified onto the pan, and that worked very well. Added cocoa powder and a quarter teaspoon of vanilla and I had a cup of hot chocolate, sweetened by syrup that had come out of a tree that same day. Kinda cool.

I Lost Almost My Entire Annual Stevia Crop Over One Mistake!

Talk about heart-breaking! 2021 was the first year that I grew Stevia, and I was really looking forward to being able to provide this to my husband, since he uses a lot of stevia for tea! But alas, my stevia-dreams died due to a weird mistake.

During Thanksgiving dinner my sister knocked a small, thin-walled glass pumpkin ornament to the floor, where it shattered. The mess was swept up and thrown away. Long story you don’t care about, but most of my stevia crop – the leaves from our several plants – ended up being swept up off of the floor about a week later, using the same broom and dustpan. Not by me, of course. After drying the leaves completely, I started to grind the leaves up into a powder, and noticed some tiny glass shards in the mix!! It was a couple tiny pieces of that shattered glass pumpkin, which got into the stevia leaves somehow during that sweeping up process. It’s just not safe to keep any of that stevia, since I can’t tell if there’s any glass still in there.

There’s no moral to this story, just sharing a bad mistake. Though maybe if I had included a certain someone much more in the progress of this plant, they might not have swept this stuff up with a contaminated broom & dust pan?