Success! I have now come full cycle with sugaring and making my own maple syrup. This afternoon Scott fired up the turkey fryer for me and I started boiling and boiling and boiling. (I do have pictures but they are still on the phone - I'll add them later.) I had 8 full gallons of sap all sitting nicely in recycled milk jugs waiting to be added and so they were in time. Each gallon was strained with a strainer & coffee filter as I poured it into the cooking pan. That worked great to get out the lichens and small flecks of bark that made their way into the collecting buckets. As I was boiling, down next to the barn and then under the wood lean-to when it started raining, I was reading one of my favorite authors, Mrs. Carla Emery. Great read for this kind of work/time killing. I also chopped some ice next to the barn to make canals for the water to run down the drive way which is already very water-logged.
Anyway after about 5.5 or 6 hours of boiling I was down to less than a gallon, so I dumped that into my big soup pot and finished it in the kitchen. It was pretty exciting when it flash boiled and I knew it was done. I did my best to strain it again, but there still seem to be some small floaties that got through. I'll have to perfect that process next time. My friend David said that the best storage for this is to BWB can it, so when it was all said and done, now at 10:30 pm, I now have 1 pint of a beautiful amber maple syrup canned and the remaining almost one cup in the fridge for the kids this weekend.
I have to say that this is some pretty tasty stuff. It is going to be hard to go back to that fake pancake syrup after tasting this. Now I am just praying that the sap keeps a flowing so I can keep a boiling. This has been a very fun process.
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