It sounded like such a good idea until....

I'm all for saving money and making your own homemade stuff whenever possible, but somethings are really not worth the effort it takes.

Example number one: Maple Syrup

While I was living in Vermont my roommates excitedly exclaimed at breakfast "Hey let's make our own maple syrup!" They looked at me expecting me to share in their excitement, but were met only with a blank stare on my face. "It will be fun!" my inner-city Chicago roommate exclaimed. Now I had made maple syrup at a number of different jobs, so I knew how much work was going to be involved. After much begging they wore me down and convinced me to help. The first weekend went simply enough a friend loaned us all the supplies we would need; sap buckets, taps, to unused large plastic garbage cans to store our sap in, a 50 gallon oil drum set up which we could use to build a fire in and put our evaporating pan on top. He was even nice enough to help us tap the trees. After a few weeks passed we had enough sap to start the boiling process. As the sap boiled down we added more sap to the pan and at the end of day one of boiling we had made about 1/4 cup of syrup. 24 hours of boiling to make a measly 1/4 cup of syrup. This went on for weeks; collecting sap, boiling sap, splitting wood for the fire barrel. After about two months of doing this every weekend we had managed to produce 6 pints of smokey tasting backyard maple syrup. 192 hours of work to create 12 cups of maple syrup that is $160.00 a cup. On average it takes 25 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup and unless you have a large and preferably shallow pan to boil it in the whole process will take a very long time.

Example number two: Candle making

While I was working on one of the Boston Harbor Islands I realized there were tons of bayberry bushes all over the island.

Northern Bayberry Shrub

After making sure it was ok with my bosses, that I harvest some of the berries, I grabbed a bunch of shopping bags and started to collect them. Two large bags of  berries later I thought I had enough to make some candles.  Now the main reason I was doing this is because in my family it has always been a tradition to burn a bayberry candle all the way down to the bottom on New Year's Eve. The legend goes that if you burn a bayberry candle all the way to the stump it will bring you good luck and prosperity in the new year.  Bayberry candles can be hard to find and when you do 100% bayberry candles can be rather expensive. Few hours of simmering the berries I had a nice little waxy skim on the top of my water. Grabbed two more bags of berries and repeated the process making maybe 1/8 of an inch of wax. Now with the invention of the internet the great Google will tell you that you need anywhere from 1-15 pounds of berries to make enough wax for a votive candle or possibly a 3 inch pillar candle! However, preinternet the reference books I was reading were not very helpful telling me only that wax content varies based on the health of the plant. After simmering about 10 shopping bags full of berries I finally admitted defeat and had created maybe a birthday candle sized amount of wax.

About 12 years later I created another type of candles which worked much better and was way easier! Tallow candles. I was working at Lewis and Clark National Historical Park where I got to dress up in costume and teach people about what life was like for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Me Tending the tallow in buckskin clothing.

One of the school programs we have at the park the students learn quill pen writing, flint and steel fire starting, and tallow candle making. Obviously it is too dangerous to have fourth-graders boiling hot flammable fat so that job fell to me and the kids would wick up the candle molds that I would be filling with tallow. At the end of the day they each went home with a candle.

What you will need:
 50 pound of kidney beef fat- this you can get by calling your local grocery store or butcher shop and ordering it. You do need to specify kidney fat or you may end up with fat better used for sausage or suet feeder making.  You will also need a large pot and an open fire. Bring the fat to a rolling boil and boil and boil until you have something which looks like a clear amber liquid. When it cools it will turn a nice off white in color.

50 pounds of boiling beef fat.

Now if you manage to get your fire to the point where you can maintain a nice rolling boil you can render down 50 pounds of beef fat in about 8 hours. Watch the level of your fire or the beef fat will go up like a roman candle if the flames get too tall. Sounds simple your thinking what could possible be the drawback? Well there are a few. If you happen to own a dog the minute you bring the tallow candle into the house the dog will try and try and try to eat the thing. After all to a dog it SMELLS SO YUMMY! Second draw back is the smell when you burn it, think smokey hamburger, not exactly the mood you were hoping for around the Thanksgiving table. Oh, the biggest draw back will be how you smell after sitting around a fire pit boiling down 50 pounds of beef fat. It is a smell that will stick with you for weeks and nothing you do will make you smell any better. I'm sure the strange smell in my old car was lingering tallow stink.

Let this stand a cautionary tale that not all good ideas are really worth the effort. 

I scream, you scream, we all scream for LOBSTER!!!!

What is it about lobsters that people find so captivating?  Granted I will give you they are great drowned in butter or served with a side of onion rings.

Yumm! Lobster roll!

This past summer I spent working on a lobster boat. Now the cool thing about this lobster boat is we are built to all of the same specifications as a commercial lobster boat with three exceptions the biggest one being we carry passengers and give tours which focus on lobsters and the local area.

Before people even get on the boat they excitedly as "Hey, are we going to hold a lobster?"  "You bet" was my standard answer. With a few exceptions every time we pull a lobster trap on to the boat there are lobsters inside waiting to be released and a few that were making their escape as we are pulling the trap out of the water. There are a number of escape hatches built into a lobster trap which allows small lobsters to escape and the lobsters can back out of the openings into the trap if they want to. Every so often there were lobsters which wandered in and due to their size couldn't always get back out.

Each of these lobsters weighs between 6-7 pounds a piece. 

If you are trying to get a sense of size for the lobsters in the above picture that is my size 9 boot in the picture and to get a sense of the size of the crusher claw of the lobster in the middle take a look at the picture below.

My hand next to a 6 pound lobsters claw.

Even with rubber bands on the claws if pass a 6-7 pound lobster around the boat for people to take pictures with many will shrink back in terror as if you are handing them a loaded hand grenade. Lobsters are a little like alligators in that their muscles work better in one direction than they do in another. Lobsters have a great amount of crushing power in the crusher claw, about 100 pounds per square inch of pressure. However, you can free your arm or finger from a lobsters claw just by placing a screwdriver in the claw and twisting. I learned this maneuver by accidentally getting three different parts of my right arm stuck in various lobsters over the summer. To answer your question no broken bones, but yes it is a pain you will remember forever.

People would ask me what is the coolest thing about lobsters I knew and questions that at the time I didn't have any answers to. 

Top 5 cool facts about lobsters:
           
             1) Lobsters can regenerate all lost body parts with the exception of one. Lobsters can not regenerate lost eyes. If a lobster were to loose an eye a different body part will regenerate in the eye socket. This means there might be a four clawed lobster roaming the deep dark waters of the of the North Atlantic Ocean.

            2) Lobsters pee out between their eyes. As lobsters fight they pee in the face of their attacker.
Even though lobsters do not have a true brain, it is more a small collection of nerve endings, they can remember the smell of  a lobster they have done battle with for close to a week.

            3) The largest lobster ever caught off the North American coast was caught in Nova Scotia back in 1977 and it was 44 pounds and estimated to be 100 years old.  The amount of force in the crusher claw of that lobster can crush the bone on a humans arm.

            4) Lobsters come in a variety of colors and can be two different colors at the same time. When you cook these crazy colored lobsters they all turn red in the end.

            5) 80% of a Maine Lobsters diet is made up of lobster bait.

Answers to some of the most perplexing tourist questions:

            1) How far does a lobster migrate?  When the ocean begins to cool down they start moving to the deeper warmer waters. Most lobsters travel about a mile from where they send the summer and the deeper waters in the winter. Some may travel about 5-6 miles in search of warmer deeper waters. There was one lobster which had been tagged and then dropped in the waters off the Continental Shelf which was later recovered off of Port Jefferson, New York. That is a traveling distance of 225 miles!

           2) Why don't people farm raise lobsters?  Simple answer way too expensive. There are a few research institutions which will collect eggs from pregnant females and hatch them in an aquarium.

The back balls are lobster eggs attached to a female.

Once they get to about one inch in length before they are released into the ocean where they will settle to the bottom of the ocean and hide in crevasses in the rocks continuing to grow. On average it takes 6-7 years before a lobster gets to the minimum marketable size for a legal lobster here in the state of Maine. So if you were to try to farm raise a lobster you would have to feed them, keep them well oxygenated, and from killing each other for 6-7 years that is a lot of time and money. That would produce a very expensive lobster!

          3) How many women are lobstermen? First yes, the correct term is lobsterman not lobsterwoman, they will correct you. about 4% of lobstermen in Maine are women. this number does not factor in the number of women who work as sternmen on a lobster boat.

         4) What is the white slimy stuff you find on the top of lobster meat? This one took me a while to figure out what white stuff people were referring to. Some of the white stuff you find on lobster meat is nothing more than a connective membrane just under the lobsters shell and there is also a little bit of fat. When lobsters are cooked their blood which is normally clear turns kinda white and gelatinous.

         5) How much of the weight of a lobster is the weight of its shell? This one the answer is proving to be a little more elusive. Right now I have not been able to sleuth out that answer. Next time I will get my lobster to go and bring it home and pull the  shell off my lobster and weigh the edible parts and the shell separately. Stay tuned!