Homemade Plum Fruit Leather

The other day when I wrote about our plum bonanza and all the different ways we've used up the hundreds of plums we picked, I forgot about fruit leather. The kids don't love it because it's not overly sweet, but Karl and I think it's pretty good.

Here's what I did:

I pitted and coarsely chopped about 4 cups of purple plums and put them in a sauce pan with about 3/4 cup of water and about 3/4 cup of honey. We had just harvested honey so instead of adding sugar, I used last year's honey in an effort to really start using it up. I cooked the plums at a simmer until they were really soft, about 15 minutes. I then poured the plums, in small batches, into a food processor and blended until the mixture was a thick puree.

After laying a Silpat baking sheet on a large jelly roll pan, I poured the plum puree into the pan and tried to get it as even a layer as a could. The first time I made fruit leather, I thought the mixture would seep under the edge of the Silpat and be a big mess, but I guess because the mixture is so thick and the mat is sticky, that just doesn't happen. After the mixture is fairly evenly spread, bake the leather in the oven at the lowest temperature at which your oven can be set for several hours (180 degrees is what our oven does) until it's dry to the touch. The fruit leather peels off the Silpat easily and then can be laid on a plastic wrap and rolled up.

Plum Brandy Part 2

After a couple of days on the counter, the plum brandy builds up a lot of pressure. The lids of the mason jars are bulging. I guess one of the jars wasn't closed exactly right, and that one began dented and started leaking all over the counter when we turned it upside down this morning. When I opened it, it exploded,  foaming and bubbling all over the place like a can of pop that's been shaken. Because it was so full, in order to close it up again -- with a brand new lid -- I had to remove three big, bloated plums. I tried to put a bit of the liquid caught in the cereal below back into the jar, but the jar is just too full. Not really sure what's going to happen with this jar so we'll just have to see.

Plums Galore

The community garden down the street has two plum trees -- one with small purple plums and the other with larger yellow plums -- that were just dripping with fruit this spring. Malin and I picked buckets of them over a couple of weeks. This week the temperature has been in the high nineties and I think the tree is finally done. We made plum jam (which cooked way too long and turned into plum butter), baked a half dozen plum cakes and ate dozens fresh. We still had about 15 pounds of them left so we made plum brandy. According to several recipes found on various blogs, the ingredients and process are simple. Fill glass jars with plums, add sugar, add cheap vodka and let sit for three months. We used quart jars and added 3/4 cup of sugar to each plus about a cup of vodka.


The jars are now on our counter awaiting a more permanent home for the rest of the summer. The white stuff at the bottom of the jars is sugar. It's been two days since we filled the jars and all that sugar has dissolved. One of the recipes says to flip the jars upside down every day. We'll probably do that for while until we go on vacation.

In other news, here is the potato harvest from one of my garden buckets. I honestly don't know how whole cultures survived on potatoes. I can't grow them.









And now for the drum roll......along with yellow squash that is already overflowing, here are our first tomatoes and cucumber of the season. The cucumber was grown from seed and I think I started it mid-March. The tomatoes are Super Sweet 100s and were planted by my GS troop in mid-April. They were pretty big when they went into the ground.