Fruit!

[magid]

omly was kind enough to let me be one of the people picking plums from her gloriously abundant plum tree last month. I'm not sure of the variety; they were fairly little, and yellow with some red blush when ripe, very sweet. I ended up going over three times, which netted me a bit over 51 pounds of fruit.

Over the course of a week and a half, I made a quart batch of plum liqueur, and a pint batch of plum-star anise liqueur. I dried a couple of trays of plum pieces, and the boozy fruit left over from the liqueurs. The rest got turned into jam, in three batches, for a total of 10 pints of plum jam, three half-pints, and five minis. I'm really happy with the flavor, rather tart, but should consider other uses for plums as well.

---

The League of Urban Canners (LUrC) is a group that contacts owners of fruit trees, offering to pick the fruit and give some of the canned results to the owners, though more goes to the harvesters and canners (who may or may not be the same people).

One of the locations they arranged to harvest was some crab apple trees across the street from my house. I ended up with 16.6 pounds or thereabout early this week. I found an interesting spiced crab apple recipe to use for some of them (what I'd think of as a sweet pickle, with cinnamon, ginger, and star anise). That was five pints. The rest I put into my soup pot for a batch of crab applesauce. It was more work than regular applesauce, since I had to borrow a food mill to get all the bits out (there were a lot of bits), but a very pretty pink, and rather tart. I put in a little honey, which mitigated the edge of tart only, and canned seven pints of crab applesauce.

---

Tuesday, a friend and I went picking peaches and nectarines at an orchard in Harvard (the town). It's amazing how quick it is to pick large fruit, compared to berries and such! When it was time to pay, I'd picked about seven and a half pounds each of peaches and nectarines, so I picked up a peck more of nectarines (eight quarts, according to the receipt).

In the last day or so, some have been eaten as is. I've started a quart jar of nectarine liqueur. I made a batch of nectarine jam with ginger (five pints), a batch of peach mostarda (five pints), a batch of sweet nectarine pickles using the leftover from brine the crab apple pickles (four pints), a batch of mostly-peach salsa (four pints), and dried two trays of nectarine slices in the oven.

I have about 20 nectarines left. I'm not sure what I want to do with them: another batch of jam, perhaps with hot pepper this time? freeze a bunch for later? nectarine chutney? a cake or two (perhaps freezing one for Rosh Hashana)? I'm not sure.