Organic Maple Syrup

Perusing vegan cookbooks recently, I've noticed a tendency to recommend maple syrup as a sweetener. Yes, it's sucrose, but perhaps tree juice is ahead of refined cane sugar and the demon corn. And it also has flavor.

I cannot abide most artificial flavorings, and although some faux maple comes from the authentic spice fenugreek, there's nothing like the real thing. Coombs Family Farms' maple syrup is very real. The Coombs have been tapping trees for seven generations, some of the maples now three hundred years old and twenty feet in girth, and the tasty results culminate in a 100% pure organic maple syrup voted #1 by Gourmet magazine.

Of course it's a favored breakfast and dessert flavor, but I heard that some use it on grapefruit. I'll have to try it, perhaps in a salad dressing with grapefruit segments and baby spinach. Okay, and a few pecans, toasted with roughly ground black pepper. (I beg your pardon: I've been restricted to institutional meals recently, and am experiencing detailed fantasies regarding seasonings, fresh produce, and cheese that is not an unnatural glowing orange hue.) Granddaddy Coombs said, “Do right by the forest, and it will do right by you.” Sure does.

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