As local as it gets!
Snow showers on the first day of spring?! Even with winter’s seemingly endless grip, signs of the season are all around us. We all have our favorites. I must admit top of my list of early signs is baseball spring training and opening day.
But spring’s arrival is most elegantly ushered in by its many signs in nature. One of my customers says his favorite is the arrival of the beautiful rose-breasted grosbeaks on his office feeder in Woodbury. Every year without fail they arrive during the last week of April, neither earlier nor later. Such are the joys and mysteries of the season.
As I write this, Western Connecticut’s sugar maples are dotted with sap buckets giving way to maple syrup celebrations and announcing the arrival of warmer days. Maple sugaring time, a New England tradition, is underway.
In Woodbury, Flander’s Nature Center taps over 300 maple trees around town to make their syrup. Its intense maple flavor and rich buttery taste is absolutely perfect on pancakes! Which is why their annual pancake breakfast – complete with fresh maple syrup – is always a much-anticipated tradition in Woodbury. Demonstrations are being held at their Sugar House this month.
In Litchfield, Brookside Farm II makes four grades of maple syrup the old fashioned way with delicious results. Sap is collected from their sugar bush of 500 trees. Using a high-efficiency oil-fired burner, their production process yields 100% pure organic maple syrup. It is Brookside Farm II’s dark amber syrup that makes our Sugar Shed Maple Truffle “pop” with flavor.
At Plum Brook we proudly support our local community and the communities of cacao farmers, sourcing local ingredients and fair trade certified chocolate to craft our delectable creations. It isn’t just about great chocolate, but about enriching the community through chocolate. Caring for our community and about communities as far away as South America and West Africa and all the places where cacao is grown and traded is important to us. Folks here in the Northwest Corner and elsewhere in rural Connecticut know that choices about how and where things are grown and produced can make big differences for local communities wherever they may be.
Our Sugar Shed Maple Truffle is but one example of this. This is why we combine fine, ethically produced chocolate with the freshest locally produced and grown ingredients we can find. Love and passion for what we do is included! We think the results speak for themselves and hope you will too.
“No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.” – Proverb
Enjoy!