Sweetness

The kids and I happened to pass a stack of sugar canes at the grocery store the other day and because I was feeling adventurous and because the canes were only $1.50 each, we bought one to experiment with. I must say it was a success. PC must have really enjoyed it because if he wasn't in the picture, he was either hovering nearby or circling the dishwasher looking for handouts.

The cane was about 4 feet long and 1½ inches in diameter. Ours was a dark brown, smooth and had natural sections each about 3 inches long down it's length. (That would be Emma's hand in the bottom-left corner of this picture.)

First we cut off a few of the sections and tried peeling them. It was difficult even with a very sharp knife so we gave up on peeling whole sections and did the peeling after the next step.

Step 2. was cutting the sections into ½inch discs, and that made peeling the woody outer layer much easier.

Then we peeled the discs. Here PC is finishing off one disc, but there are two more still on the cutting board to show you the peeling process.

A closer look.

You can eat the discs or you can cut them up smaller like I did here. I figured it would make the eating process easier for my little people if we made little people bite-sized pieces.

Happiness is...

TIP: This is probably a good outside snack because you chew the sugar cane pieces, extracting all the sweetness and then you spit out the woody pulp.

Spitting out "sugar sticks". They caught on pretty quickly.

Loading up on SUGAR...

Dolly


PC


Emma

They ate the sugar cane cubes as fast as I could prepare them, so I stopped cutting it after about 5 or 6 sections. Thankfully it was a sunny day and I could send them out to burn off some of their extra energy!

THE END

Now I just have to decide when we cut up the other half of our sugar cane.