Breakfast of Champions

Yesterday was a beautiful spring day, so we took advantage of it by participating in (or in my case, watching) the running of the sap in the hills of Spring Green. Ever since doing an interview with Dan two years ago for a Feature Writing class, I've longed to see maple syrup go from tree to bottle, and Saturday was our chance.

If you've never had sap straight from the tree, you'll be astonished at what it tastes like: nothing! It looks and tastes like water with the barely a hint of sweetness to it. Apparently, sap is 75% water, so it takes 4 gallons of the stuff to make 1 gallon of sweet, gooey syrup. If you have a chance to cruise this batch of pics,

Running of the Maple Syrup

you can see the syrup in its various stages - it starts out clear, and it's the cooking down of the stuff that gives it its familiar amber color. And the smell...Cooking down maple syrup smells like a campfire with an occasional whiff of mapleness. So good. It was a very cool experience and hopefully within a couple of weeks we can taste the finished product. I really hope that happens, because I feel that that would redeem our Saturday morning breakfast of pancakes with watery, maple-free Hungry Jack syrup *hangs head in shame.*

Speaking of breakfast, even since getting on the preggo train I've cut coffee out completely. It wasn't an easy task, but being spooked by the possible side-effects of caffeine on pregnancy made it doable. I accepted the fact that decaf was my fate for the next 9 months, and to make it more bearable I went for flavored decaf coffees loaded with sugar to mask what I was sure was the unsavory truth of the taste of decaf coffee.

But after 17 weeks of having my Sunday morning cinnamon rolls without that nice, bitter balance of coffee I felt something had to be done. So, I wandered into an unfamiliar section of the coffee and tea aisle: decaf, instant, plain coffee. Apparently, I've gotten pregnancy dyslexia (is that a thing?), because I picked up a container of this thinking it said "Barely Coffee," which isn't really that wrong, but it's not exactly right, either.

It's not that bad. I'm pretty excited about it, really. Having this stuff gives me back a part of my morning routine. Just in time for Monday morning. Awesome.