A Grade A Kind of Day

Hi!  I’m Kari’s husband, Eric, and I’m updating her blog today while she’s catching up on Project Runway.

With the brief maple syrup season upon us, we wanted to continue our annual tradition of eating a pancake breakfast at a local sugar shack.  Last night we went to MassMaple.org and found what looked to be a good one that was twenty minutes away, in Ashfield, Massachusetts.  It opened at 8:30am, so we figured that we’d be fine if we got there by 9am.  This morning, the drive up to South Face Farm was quiet; we saw almost no cars on the road.  “Great!” we thought.  We’ll be there before anyone else.

Well, the real reason there weren’t any cars on the road was because they were all already at South Face Farm, eating pancakes, and there was over an hour wait to get a table.  Yikes!  We put our name on the list and hung out, waiting to be called.

In the meanwhile, we saw someone who looks exactly like my mother, which was really weird.  Here’s a picture of my fake-mom, who apparently goes by the name of “Sue.”

We also learned a lot about the process of getting the sap from the trees (it’s clear in color!), boiling it down (forty gallons of sap = one gallon of syrup!), and what the different grades of syrup are.

Even though the Grade B syrup looks like it has the best color, its not eatin’ syrup, it’s only used for cooking.

Eventually, we got in.  According to the menu, they’re only open for five weekends a year for breakfast.  This is a neat painting of South Face Farm that was hanging on the wall where we were seated.

Our waitress was super nice and shortly our breakfast arrived.  Wow.  It was wicked good.  The pancakes were awesome, the syrup couldn’t be any fresher, the fritters were so good they ran out while we were there, the eggs were good, the sausage was abnormally good, and so was the service.  Everything was locally grown/made too, which was a nice touch.  It was definitely more than worth the wait.

Here’s a view of a field we drove by on the way home.  I like the equal parts snow, trees, and sky.

And here, on a back road near our town, are some old-fashioned sap buckets.  These days, the sap is collected with plastic tubing strung through the trees, but once in a while you can still find clusters of metal buckets hanging from trees in the same way you’d imagine seeing it done in a Norman Rockwell painting.