Yeah, before you flame my use of "pluming", which even MSWord never heard of, forget it. I made it up, okay?!

My weekend was plum delicious, in case you're wondering what inspired the title of this post. On the south side of the house, we planted an Italian plum four years ago. The first year it mostly grew a huge crop of aphids sucking the sweet life out of the tree, I feared. Each year after that the tree has expanded its delicious plum output exponentially. Last year we went Med cruising as they came ripe and were completely prunishly shriveled when we returned in mid October. This year, I was determined to use every last plum and so began harvesting them this last week. Oh my. And just how many plums can one tree generate, you might ask. Way too many, I say. I've never done any canning, but the DH and I declared, "How hard can it be?" and bought all the equipment--jars, lids, sugar, etc. And set to work.

The DH's mother, LL, came over on Saturday to help me pit the plums that the DH pulled off the tree--all flipping day long. And there were still a huge amount left on for his Sunday pluming, while I made plum jam, plum conserve, and put up plum halves in medium syrup. I followed recipes in my ancient Better Homes and Garden cookbook and "double" or perhaps over-processed the first jars of jam. The recipe ordered me to cook the plum and sugar mixture until thickened then put in hot jars and seal, which I did. Then the DH and I figured that if you "can" stuff you have to put the jars in boiling water, which we did. Then my sissy-in-law of the thousand cookbooks called to get a report on the great pluming. We told her what we'd done and she said that we didn't have to water bath the jam as it was already cooked. Ah well, we cooked the crap out of the stuff, I guess.

Cautionary Note: Watch out everyone, really done plum jam incoming to your home this holiday season.

I have jars of plumy goodness sitting all over the place and still another bushel of plums to process. Oh my. Did you know that fresh plums turn your fingers brown and the nails, too? Oh yeah, I'm looking good and for plum recipes. I think we're going to get really, really tired of plums in whatever form. So help us out and email your recipes, preferably the tried and tasty ones, and I'll share with you the plumy fruits of September.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmelinda