Sugaring season is coming to a close. This is sad news, because I won’t be able to spend my Sunday mornings inhaling sugar steam and eagerly snapping dweeby pictures of evaporators and old taps. The end of sugaring season is also something to celebrate, because it means that spring is really and truly afoot. That’s basically the whole point, and the whole rub, of eating seasonally- something is always ending, which is sad, but it always means that something else is on its way. And when that something is summer, it’s hard to be too broken up about it.
So! This was the last weekend that the Red Bucket in Worthington was open for breakfast, and the place had been recommended to me by someone who knows what’s what when it comes to sugar, so I went. Turns out Worthington is actually really far away from Northampton.
When you walk in, there’s a little store and they’re boiling the sap right there, so you can 
check out their evaporator, which was kind of neat and also kind of like being in a steamy little cave because of all the condensation on the walls.
The restaurant is in the next room over and has a whole wall of windows so it’s bright and cheery in there. My roommate opined that it was the most charming sugarhouse we had visited yet. I don’t know if I’d go quite *that* far, but maybe I’m just being non-committal.
The food was, you know, normal. Nothing to write home (or a whole blog post) about. My dining companions both got pancakes with a variety of nuts and chocolate chips and butterscotch chips and a bunch of other stuff in them, and they both looked pleased and slightly ill when the meal was over. I opted for the more conservative blueberry-walnut-chocolate chip pancakes, because I know how to practice some freaking restraint, jeez.
It was served on plastic-ware, which I think is pretty unappetizing, but I get that these places don’t always have the capital to invest in an industrial washer. In the end, I’d say it was worth the trip, and I’ll look forward to hitting it up again when the next sugar season rolls around.
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