This is Recipe Roundup, episode 103. This week we have more maple recipes and suggestions from Beth Armstrong. In addition to being wonderful for desserts, maple syrup is a great natural sweetener and flavor for more natural dishes!

Maple Carrots

3-4 Cups sliced carrots

2 Tbs. Butter

½ Cup Pure Maple Syrup

Place all above in saucepan and simmer on low until carrots are soft.

Kids love these too!

Maple Cinnamon Apples

Wash and peel and core apples to fit your baking dish as you would baked apples.  Simply add a dash of cinnamon and a tsp. of pure maple syrup to each apple half.  Bake as you would regular baked apples at 350F until done.

Beth Added the following message: 

We have grown up eating maple syrup all our lives.  My first memory is of “Clinkers” at the Ackey Varner Farm and have loved it since.  Luckily, we have friends who make syrup and actually my husband and his friend made a big run last year so we have enough for a couple years yet.  They call their syrup North Fork Original and it was made the old fashioned way…open pan, no press or filtering.  They carried the sap to the sugar house and kept the pan heated with wood from the farm where the trees are located.  Very rustic and simple but requires some hard work.  After boiling the sap down and the final product is ready, they poured hot syrup into glass canning jars.  In the bottom of our glass jars, you see a sediment that’s called the “sugar sand”.  What that actually is are the minerals out of the tree and contain organic salt and other good stuff we don’t eat.  We pour to the bottom and discard the “sugar sand”. 

Beth also included a list of what she uses maple syrup for: coffee, tea, on ice cream, sometimes on toast if they are out of honey, and of course on buckwheat and pancakes!  They enjoy buying from local producers and Vermont syrup or some other syrup we see advertised and compare.  She won’t say who she prefers between Pocahontas, Highland and Pendleton producers, but says they are to the North Fork Original – which is not for sale by the way….just a fun hobby that promotes friendship and comradery until Spring farm chores prevail!