This & That: My Week

The sixth season is in full swing at my house...actually the fifth and sixth seasons. They both sort of collide with each other. For the uninitiated, the six seasons here are Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Hunting and Canning.

So my kitchen is looking like this. Last week it was peaches, pears and peach jam. This week it was plums (from our own tree), plum-raspberry jelly and whole garden tomatoes.

While I really appreciate being able to store and preserve the summer bounty, I am irritated by the plums. It's irrational, I know, but at our previous house, we had a mature plum tree that had the most gorgeous and tasty purple-fleshed plums. It made the prettiest and awesomely delicious jam. When we decided to put a plum tree in this yard, I specifically went looking for on with purple-fleshed fruit, and the garden center people assured me that the tree I bought did indeed have purple fruit. I ask you, does this look like purple fruit to you???? And I'm just so annoyed by this. And I'm annoyed that I had to wait 4 years to find out that we didn't have what we wanted. My DH likes bottled plums, so I always do a few quarts of them for him, but The Girl always remarks about how gross and disgusting they look in the bottles with their kind of sickly orange flesh poking out. The skins give a really nice color to the syrup initially, but over the year, that fades to a less pink color that really does look a little gross with the orangey fruit. Perfectly safe, but not what I wanted.

I throw some of the softer plums in the steamer/juicer with a few raspberries to do a batch of plum-raspberry jelly. Thankfully, the raspberries give the juice a pretty pink color so this jelly, which is very tasty, looks decent. My boys tell me to just put in different tree, but I can't use all the fruit this one produces effectively, so what would I do with twice the output? Like I said, I know it's irrational, but really, I'm just so annoyed by the plums.