Life at Sweet Wind Farm

Follow along with me as we venture into different seasons and activities going on at our farm.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Kitchen

When we first designed the sugarhouse, we knew we wanted a kitchen to be put in. Most of the square footage of the building is comprised of the maple producing area and its equipment: the evaporator, the RO, the finisher, the canner, sinks and work space. The upstairs is mostly storage for all of the tanks, tubing, buckets, supplies, and the tank holding room where we keep a large stainless steel tank for holding the sap and keeping it cold until we are ready to boil it. There is one half of the downstairs we call the "classroom" because it is presently used as a classroom area for presenting educational classes on maple sugaring to groups. When we designed the sugarhouse, we had it built with a front porch. Originally this porch was to span the whole length of the front of the building. As we were building, we realized we needed more space for putting a kitchen in, so we decided to have a portion of the porch walled in and made as part of the inside. This little space was always called the "kitchen" even though it wasn't one until very recently. We bought a large 3 bay sink at an auction a long time ago with anticipation of installing it in our kitchen. We also bought a glass cooler, a glass covered chest freezer, a vent hood, a grill, stainless steel tables, and more at auctions. They came from either a chinese restaurant and a Wendy's that was going out of business, or an auction we went to for a farm going out of business. We also were given a 6 burner Garland range with 2 ovens, that was originally donated to the fire department to put in their kitchen remodel. Well, they ended with something nicer and didn't want it, so it sat in pieces inside our sugarhouse for almost 3 years.
We kept all of these things in storage, until Arlow got motivated to have it all up and running in time for this last Maple Festival. All of a sudden things started to come together. We first had floor heat installed. (I wish we had floor heat in the whole downstairs, as the blower to the heater is wicked noisy) We spent a good part of a Sunday afternoon at Home Depot picking out flooring, and ended up with getting some porcelain tiles that were on clearance. The radiant floor heat went in, the tiles on top of that, new plugs put in, the walls and ceiling were covered! Next the sinks were installed with new plumbing, the stove put back together over a period of a few nights work with the help of a neighbor, and lo and behold, a kitchen! It's still a bit small, with no cupboards and not much counter space, but it's a beginning. I hope we can add on with extending the square footage so we can have enough space for sugar making too. That needs a lot of counter space. Just the candy making machine alone takes up a lot of space. In fact, this piece of equipment is sitting on top of the player piano in the classroom collecting dust. I still make candy by hand, and put the sugar in a funnel and pour it from there. I still haven't tried out the candy maker even though we've owned it for over 2 years now! We also have a maple cream maker, which is in the house sitting on the dining room floor. Ugh. I don't really want it there, it belongs out in the sugarhouse kitchen but the kitchen is too small. Well, we hope that we don't have much more to do in order to get a commercial kitchen license for selling other products, like maple granola, maple coated nuts, maple cookies, breads, pies, pickles, relish,
and more. We hope that we can sell these types of specialty food products at the farmers' markets we attend. We'd love to have a maple soft serve ice cream maker, a maple cotton candy maker, a snow shaver for doing sugar-on-snow, and maple kettle corn would be fun too! Well, one thing at a time, for now we'll stick with pancakes.

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