Chutney Flight

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All Winter we've been toying with new recipes. This year we decided to spend some time to develop and offer a line of chutneys. The result is a Kiwi and a Raspberry chutney (using our own organic fruits) and of course, since we are in Peach country, a Peach chutney using some Niagara grown Peaches.

For the chutney lovers!

Since we serve some great Ontario artisan cheeses at the Tea Room, this gave us an idea for this week's special. Most people have heard of a beer or wine "flight", a tasting or selection of beer or wines. We decided to create a chutney flight. This is a selection of our new chutneys (including our tomato relish which has become quite popular), each served with an Ontario artisan cheese and a basket of bread....perfect for the cheese lover!

Meanwhile on the farm, our work is increasing. With the soil soft, we are now able to return to our Kiwis and begin the transplanting of some rather mature plants. We're not sure they will take, but we did need to clean up our rows and maximize fruit production. All of the large vines we were able to transplant had already grown some formidable roots.

Example of one transplanted and trellised Kiwi.

Our major project this Spring, the accessory building, is also coming along very fast. Everything is up and we're just now waiting for the main door. The building was finished to match the colours of our barn.

Just waiting for the door!

Finally, we finished and bottled our first batch of Maple syrup. As reported on in last week's blog entry, this year's syrup is very dark (copper like) and seems sweeter.

We also  had some major problems with "Maple sand" (the crystallization of minerals in the sap). This year's batch had to be filtered 3 times to remove these crystals. Nevertheless, we're quite proud of our syrup this year. The flavour certainly seems more intense than last year.

We're quite proud of this year's batch of Maple syrup.

Now that we are finishing our last batch of Maple syrup, it has also proven time to start work on the next set of trees: the Birch. Birch tapping can be done a little after Maple and so we have now started to tap the few trees on the property. After all, one of our Tea Room menu items includes a warm mushroom salad prepared with Birch syrup!

Tapping Birch: the process is identical to Maple.

We'll end this week with a few photos that indicate that Spring is definitely on it's way (even though we still had some snow this week).

The bees are waking up!

The Skunk Cabbage will soon be the first to attract insects in the creek.

The Strawberry Rhubarb is "peeking" through.