Love Cake

Sweet Times

It's that time of the year again, where sweet maple syrup delights are taking over my Montreal folk's Facebook photo albums. And it's that same time of the year where I torture myself clicking on each sweet maple photo drooling and wishing I could join the glucose madness, instead of dreaming about it, here in Washington D.C. This delicious syrup has been a stable of the Quebecois diet for hundreds and hundreds of years and each spring, hundreds of sugar-loving sap alchemists disappear into shacks on their maple plantations to render the year's crop of maple syrup.

It has been a decade since I haven't set foot in a rustic sugar shack. I miss those Pocahontas moments I used to have, where I was so grateful to Mother Nature for blessing us with those sumptuous giving maple trees. I did feel like I could paint with all the colors of the wind (probably the sugar high did this to me). All these fond memories of the sugar shack. I felt like it was my way to feel like a true Québécoise.

Our schools used to take us to the sugar shack every year on a field trip. It was by far, one of my ultimate favorite field trips as a kid. I got to visit those little log shacks, take a nice long hike in the woods and ride on the hay ride around the site. Without mentioning the succulent sweet and salty feast : thick slices of maple Canadian ham, baked beans, gigantic omelets, pancakes, tourtière (Canadian meat pie), deep fried pork rinds called "oreilles de Christ" ( The Christ's Ears...perhaps because they are so melty, salty and decadently good you invoke him while savoring them?), pickled beets, Creton (a savory meat spread), split pea and bacon soup, and all the crazy desserts with guess which key element in it? Maple Syrup.

We would eat as if it was Thanksgiving or Christmas again, reassuring ourselves that we would end up digesting it while hiking in the woods or even better, while dancing afterwards, at the disco area in the shack itself. I couldn't be happier: a dance floor with upbeat 80's and early 90's music after a sumptuous sweet meal and my little school crush of that year right across from the room. How many years in a row did I daydream he'd ask me for a dance...

And to top it all, the field trip always ended with the tasting of the famous "Tire", which was boiling thick gooey maple syrup laid on a bed of snow. We would have to use a popsicle stick to pick it up and roll it around the stick to savor this delicious frozen maple lollipop. I was in maple heaven! Those were definitely sweet times. I look forward to bringing my little family to enjoy this spring tradition one day...