Plum Jelly Round-Up

Earlier this year, tired of squirrel bandits on my bird feeders - I discovered that I could trap them in my Hav-A-Hart trap -- and relocated 3 of 5 squirrels to a park two miles away.  The unexpected upside of this is that my neighbors finally got tree-ripened loquats and I had a LOT more plums on the tree in my backyard this year -- I harvested about 125 lbs in the two days before July 4th!

I barely had room in my freezer and fridge to put all the juice and puree -- and this week I am making up jelly -- a lot of it!

Plum-Habanero
16 c plum juice + 1 c lemon juice + 4 c sugar + 5Tb & 1tsp pectin + 5Tb & 1tsp calcium water + 3.75 oz habaneros (seeds cut out) =

• 21- half pints plum habanero jelly

Plum-Habanero-Lemongrass

• 18 - half pints 
• 15 - quarter pints

 Plum
20 cups of plum juice + 5 c sugar + pectin/calcium water + 1 c lemon juice =

• 11 - 20 oz jars 
• 13 - half pints

Plum-Lemongrass
24 cups of plum juice + 6 c sugar + pectin/calcium water + 1 1/4 c lemon juice + lemongrass =

• 33 - half pints

Pears, Persimmons & Sourdough

Well, it's been a while! What can I say except that things got away from me. I visited family in November, my mother visited for 3 weeks in December, plus I had to deal with the 8 weeks long chest cold from hell. 

My chief culinary accomplishments of late fall and early winter include:

PEARS: My friend George forwarded me a note from a community list along with a photo of a gorgeously laden and tempting looking pear tree.  I harvested about 30+ lbs of small pears which seemed quite hard, along with my friend Veronika.  The location was near Oakland's Chinatown, so while we were back there, some neighbors came by and also harvested some pears.  V and I thought they were kind of firm but one lady bit into it and said they were good.

The pears were small, a bit mealy and very hard.  They had a yellow-green skin under a brown layer that scraped off with light application of fingernail or nylon scrubby pad.  I washed all the pears and laid them out to ripen on trays.  And waited.  And waited.  After 2 weeks, some of them just went mushy, so I did some research.

What I discovered is that there are some old varieties of pears that are only for cooking - I think these pears were Kiefer pears.  So, I poached some pears and they came out so amazingly delicious!  I canned the rest of the pears in several batches - some with light syrup and some with light syrup and spices (clove, cinnamon, star anise). I'll be set for a while for canned pears, I promise some lovely pear photos.

PEAR VINEGAR: As Marilee from Urban Legend Cellars said, "folks don't know how EASY it is to make vinegar!"  I put a big pile of pear peelings and cores into a gallon glass jar with distilled water - and I keep adding water and aerating it.  It's now growing a mother on top - just like kombucha or Bragg's apple cider vinegar!  Soon I will get up the nerve to taste my pear vinegar.  Expanded post with pictures coming soon.

GROUND CHERRY JELLY: the ground cherries kept going long after everything else quit.  The one Giant Ground Cherry plant I got from Annie's is still going out there - and I hope to promote those for the next season over the smaller kind.  I made up 12 half pints of jelly but it didn't set as firmly as I want, so the jars are still on the kitchen windowsill waiting to be remade (or poured over pound cake and ice cream, tough call).


PERSIMMONS: In early November, I made my annual harvest of persimmons from Larissa & Geoff's 3 story high Hachiya persimmon tree. After I picked about 200 persimmons in early November, left them to ripen while I was gone for a week - and ripen they did!  Then I and dried them all - with some pulp in the freezer as usual.  I made two giant trays of persimmon bread pudding for Holly & Marina's wedding reception - it was very well received and there were no leftovers!

SOURDOUGH: I took a Sour Flour class just a few days into the onset of the Horrible Chest Cold from Hell - and had mixed results with the starter (it eventually died).  I plan to get some starter from a neighbor named Ana.

GARDEN - Veggies vs Flowers: no, I did not manage to get my winter greens garden in properly this year again.  However, I did manage to keep alive my digitalis purpura and put it in the ground, along with some jasmine and a 2-stick rose plant - so there will be lovely scented flowering things along the fence in my garden.  The brugmansia that I got as a leafless wine barrel size root ball from Freecycle is flourishing in the side yard and sending up leaves and new growth, fingers x'd that I will have some lovely scented angel trumpets in the spring.

The broccoli di cicco has gone feral and seems to be flowering continuously - an attack of little grey aphid-y things on the broccoli, mustard and broccoli rab volunteers makes them inedible but I am leaving the large stand of broccoli di cicco because it seems to be making the honeybees very happy.  Once my other flowering plants start producing flowers, I will tear it out to make space for tomatoes.

What I love about my neighborhood is that you get random curb scores - I got a paper grocery sack half full of rhizomes labeled "FREE!" Purple and light blue irises!" which are going into the ground along the house by my steps this week.


Wow! And here I thought I hadn't done much - it turns out I've just been a lazy blogger! I promise to make it up to you, the one reader who still checks in on my blog occasionally (hi Aunt Sue!) and some backdated posts that I obviously owe are coming this week!

Ground Cherries!

I ended up with about a gallon of ground cherries - cooked them down and finished making the jelly.  I had the same issue as last year - it doesn't seem to want to set very well, but finally set with a very soft jell - just perfect for eating out of the jar!

Ground Cherry Jelly
12 - 8 oz jars

Jelly Catch-up

I had much good fortune - my friend Eric was visiting  for the first time in years and we went up for a wine country tour in Dry Creek.  We got to Preston Vineyards just at closing but got in a tasting anyway - I managed to catch the young lady clearing away the self-serve produce from the stand and bought up all the muscat grapes that were for sale at $1 per pound.  I have to confess - it has been an old dream of mine to make grape jelly. 

As soon as my dear friend departed, I pulled out the grapes, the ground cherries I had been cooking down and some plum juice I had frozen in July and made three batches of jelly.  Since the grapes & ground cherries are so sweet, I used as little sugar as I could get away with.

The Muscat Grape Jelly came out better than I can possibly express and only a few people get to try it because I only ended up with about 12 half pints.  I ate one with a spoon after chilling it in the fridge - it was way better than grape jell-o.

The Ground Cherry Jelly was truly a unique, delicate and amazing experience.  It still is.  Again - it was a small batch but I plan to make more next year.  The plum jelly came out rich and delicious as always - low sugar means it was a bit more tart but I'd happily sub that for cranberry jelly at any holiday dinner!

• Muscat Grape Jelly
• Ground Cherry Jelly
• Plum Jelly (with frozen plum juice)

Quince Jelly

This year, my quince jelly came out a gorgeous shade of rose instead of a deep carnelian - perhaps because I used unrefined cane sugar (I may have used sucanat last year...). The half gallon jar of juice was so thick and syrupy without sugar - having soaked with a vanilla bean pod for a week - it was edible as it was and I nearly broke out my seltzer bottle to make it into quince soda!

However, preserving prevailed and I made a gorgous quince jelly instead:

YIELD:
6 - 12 oz jars quince jelly
3 - 4 oz jar quince jelly

Dulce de Membrillo - Quince 2009

Quince season is here once again - my friend sent out the bat-signal to tell me that they ripened early and "I have quince falling to the ground and rotting!" I hadn't been excited about trying quince again this year but not wanting to be bested by a damned furry pear-apple thing, I gamely headed over with Scott and we cleaned up the groundfall and picked the tree clean.

This year, there were far fewer quince - I ended up with 27# of quince. Some of them were quite large - the size of big softballs, with the smallest being tennis ball size. They are almost all entirely yellow - much riper this year than last year, so that heartened me a lot. My friend and her fiance invited us to help them taste test wines for their wedding and we had a nice visit, even cleaning up some of the gorgeous pink flesh apples - again, fewer than last year but still quite yummy. Her apricot tree, so far, is the only fruit tree that really overproduced this year (though the persimmons are still small and unripe - I may end up with another 200# of those this year).

Today, while my friend married her best friend, I quartered and peeled 14# of quince. I cooked the first 4# batch while I continued to clean some more. When the next batch was ready, I strained the first and retained the water, pouring it back into the pot over the next batch of raw quince quarters.

I've ended up with 17 cups of quince puree and a half gallon of gorgeous rose coloured quince juice for jelly. The puree is on the stove - a pretty high 1:1 puree to sugar ratio is recommended by most recipes for membrillo.

My plan this year is to line some shallow cardboard boxes with parchment and to put the cooked down puree into the dehydrator and just leave it there for days at 105 degrees til it sets. This year, gosh darn it, I am going to make membrillo that can be sliced!

Your quince recipes & membrillo making stories welcome as I wait for the puree to cook on super low, wash dishes, watch Season 1 of "Mad Men" and wait for Scott to bring over thai food and beer.

POST-SCRIPT:  The dehydrator worked BEAUTIFULLY!  I ended up with 9 pounds of quince paste that is sliceable at room temperature, and somewhat spreadable (a bit stiff) - it is so delicious that if I had managed to make it in a commercial kitchen, I believe I would be able to sell it to restaurants (at least one of my chef friends expressed interest).  I had the dehydrator at 95-105 degrees F for about a two days - very low energy usage compared to running the oven at 125 for two days, let me tell you!

I highly recommend stovetop-to-dehydrator for making your membrillo - you won't have to fuss and worry about the stove or dread overdoing it in the microwave.

Plum gone!

This morning I put the rest of the plum juice into pots and made up more plum jelly - Plum Cinnamon (inspired by Barbara's story of her German cherry-cinnamon jam making friend), and Plum Ginger. And yes, cleaning up the rest of my canning projects and other last minute projects does put a delay on other plans but at least I'll feel good about things. :)

YIELD:

Plum Cinnamon Jelly

• 3 - 12 oz jars
• 5 - 8 oz jars
• 6 - 4 oz jars

Plum Ginger Jelly

• 5 - 12 oz jars
• 2 - 8 oz jars
• 4 - 4 oz jars

Plum Habanero Jelly - with a twist!

Since the Plum Serrano came out with a nice bite - I decided to put a twist on the plum habanero this year. So far - I have managed to only rub the bottom of my nose so that's the only part of me affected by habanero tinged fingertips. No bathroom breaks or ear rubbing for a while - eep!

Plum Habanero Jelly with an Orange Twist

• 10 c plum juice
• 1 c water
  
• 7 habanero chiles, seeded and quartered (but not separated to make it easier to yank'em out!)
• 1 tsp decoriated cardamom
  
• 3 Tb finely shaved/microplaned orange zest
• 1 c orange juice (squeezed from same oranges zested)
• 5 c demerara sugar (to taste)
  
• pectin (per instructions)

I'm heating the juice to get the ingredients warmed up and then am going to simmer it down about half a cup and turn off the heat to let it steep. After it cools - check the flavor - I removed the habaneros and let the orange and cardamom steep for half a day because of other errands.

Next, I strained the orange and cardamom - measured 12 cups altogether - added 1/4 c lemon juice and then brought to a slow boil. I added the sugar with pectin, walked away and the pot overboiled so I lost 1.5 c of jelly on the stove. Could be worse, I suppose ... this stuff is yummy!

YIELD:
6 - 8 oz jars plum habanero w/twist of orange & cardamom
15 - 4 oz jars plum habanero w/twist of orange & cardamom

Quince-o-Rama

Wednesday night, I spent about five hours peeling, quartering and coring 25# of quince. My plan was to use the juicer to process the quince -- taking the juice for jelly and using the pulp to make membrillo.

Sadly, this experiment did not work. The quince just aren't juicy enough. I cooked down all the quince and set the mash to drain in the colanders overnight, reserving about 1.5 gallons of juice for jelly.

Today, I took a PTO day to finish up the quince. I really wanted to get this mess out of my kitchen. I still have 15# of Asian pears in my refrigerator to manage!

QUINCE JELLY: The quince jelly turned out great -- it set nicely, though I think I boiled it down a bit too much and could have had more jars if I hadn't been distracted with outher housework.

YIELD:
14 8 oz jars

MEMBRILLO: Next project was to make membrillo. I used the leftover pulp for one batch and the juice/mash from the juicer for another batch. I followed the instructions and added equal weight of sugar to fruit and it got thick. It got like molten lava. The spoon could stand up and jumbo drops of molten quince goo came out of the pot and to burn my arm and leave blisters. I figured, it was ready. I put the quince goo into baking dishes (and some onto a silicone mat on a half-sheet) and put it in the oven at 125 to set.

But, after 8 hours in the oven, it didn't set. It's going to stay in the oven overnight in the hopes that it reduces enough.

Peach Chipotle Jelly

YELLOW PEACH CHIPOTLE JELLY: After steeping overnight, this tasted good - smoky with a bit of a kick which will go down a few notches when I add the sugar and lemon. I strained it with a metal mesh strainer and the put it through the jelly bag. I was so enchanted with the color and body of the white peach jelly that I wanted to try it again!

Next time - more chipotle peppers.

RECIPE:

1. Strain juice from cooked peaches and measure. I ended up with 6 c. juice.
2. Strain juice through jelly bag -- add 1 c. water and simmer with 2-4 chipotle peppers. Let steep and stand overnight if you have the time, otherwise, add more water and simmer away longer.
3. Measure - add more water to get back to 6 cups (remember - you're boiling away water, you don't necessarily want to concentrate the peachiness and decrease your yield).
4. Add 1/2 c. lemon juice, and follow instructions for your pectin. I used Pomona's Pectin, so added 6 tsp of "calcium water" and put 6 tsp of pectin powder into 2.5 c. of sugar.
5. Bring to a boil, then add the sugar-pectin mix, stir and make sure it dissolves and doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan.
6. Return to a simmer.
7. Skim foam.
8. Put a test -- a teaspoon of jelly on a plate -- in the freezer for a few minutes. If it looks and feels like jelly in your mouth, you're probably all set. If not, let another test set longer, then consider adding a bit more pectin (mixed with sugar if you're using Pomona's).
9. Put into sterile, hot jars from the oven and set on the counter, or hot water process.
10. Label these jars - you don't want someone who hates spicy to get a surprise!
    

YIELD:
9 - 8 oz jars

Peach Jam

YELLOW PEACH JAM: Ah, here we are at midnight again... I cut up 2 gallons of peaches and have made peach jam. This time, I did take the skins off, so had a pot of water boiling in front of the bigger pot for the peaches, and the peaches on a big commercial baking sheet on the edge of the sink with the cutting board and cutting bowl in the middle. For 2 hours, I listened to the Olympics and had 5-6 peaches in the hot water, skinned, pitted and mashed or chopped the others. I put the hot peaches under cold water and on the side of the tray nearest me.

Then, I let the whole pot simmer while I pressed a bag full of lemons from Regan's tree -- I got 3 cups of juice which I need for jelly and for spanakopita (among other things!). I strained the fruit and divided it -- 8 cups in each pot, reserving 8 cups of juice. I ended up putting about 1.5 c of juice back into the fruit after adding the pectin, lemon and sugar.

Before going to bed, simmered the juice I strained from the pulp with some dried chipotle peppers and am going to let it steep overnight for a smoky peach chipotle jelly. No pictures, and I hope to make it to the 5:45 swim tomorrow... I'll never make it to the Olympics, unless it is the preserving Olympics!

YIELD:
14 - 12 oz
1 - 4 oz

Easy Plum (Habanero) Jelly

PLUM JELLY can be easy or difficult -- if you don't have freestone plums, the best way I've found is to clean and cook the whole fruit.

First, wash/sterilize your jars and put them on a cookie sheet in the oven at 125 or 250, whatever makes you feel good. If you don't keep the jars hot - the boiling hot jelly may make your jars crack and break, causing a big unhappy mess.  Boiling hot jelly will sizzle in the jars kept at 125 and you won't be able to grab the jars with your hands so have pot holders ready.

Next, gather your plums and wash them really well to get off all the bird poop and bugs. Or not - it's all going to get strained anyway and you might like the protein. Cut out any bad blemishes or parts you wouldn't want to eat. Your plums should look all clean and pretty:

I never add juice to the pot for the plums -- but I squish them hard with my hands as I put them into the pot -- I use both hands and squish a small handful of plums. Once the bottom of the pan is covered, I turn on the heat on low and continue adding smashed plums to the pot. This helps the juice release more quickly.

After you've smashed up all the plums and they've filled the pot with juicy goodness, turn them into a big colander or sieve lined with 2-4 layers of cheesecloth over a big bowl or pot to collect the juice.

You can stir the plums to release more juice, or pick up the corners of the cheesecloth from time to time to give a wiggle and shake. Once you've collected all your juice, you can store it and finish it another night or put it back in a pot and start thinking about flavor accents -- like habanero or jalapeno pepper or lavender.

In this picture, you can see the jars I used to store the juice in the refrigerator - you can also freeze the plum juice if you want to make it much later or really have a lot of plums.

Adding pepper can be tricky - so you have to start with a little, bring it to a simmer for five minutes and then taste it (let it cool, first!). Add more chopped pepper if you want more heat.

Simmer a bit and then strain out all the pepper (or lavender or other herbs) and put back in the pan.

Add the lemon, sugar and pectin as instructed by your pectin manufacturer. I use Pomona's pectin - so I put the lemon juice & calcium water into the pot, and mix the pectin in with the sugar really well using a wire whisk before adding.  Then I follow the instructions for bringing back to temperature and testing for set.

Pour into hot jars and put the lids on and process in hot water bath.  Then, set the jars out to cool and wait for the sweet plink of success (some people skip hot water bath with jelly -- this isn't recommended by the folks at Ball but it's done often since the simmering jelly is hotter than boiling water anyway).

Freecycle Apricots, Apricot Jam & Catnip Mystery Solved

FREECYCLE FRUIT: I put a call out on Freecycle and made contact with a woman with an apricot tree full of ripe apricots, falling to the ground. I made a quick trip over there and picked up 12# of very large, ripe, gorgeous apricots. She also offered quinces when they ripen in late August, and persimmons in the fall ("the squishy kind," she said). She has a small apple tree, so I'm going to check on that as well.

While I started prepping the apricots for jelly and jam - a neighbor came by, and we had a chat. I gave him a jar of plum jelly and he promised to bring me some Santa Rosa plums, and offered me picking privileges when his fig tree ripens in a month or so.

APRICOT CANNING GOODNESS: Last night, I made up:

YIELD:
1 - half gallon of vodka & 14 apricots for Apricot brandy
3 - 12 oz jars apricot jam
2 - 16 oz jars of apricot jam
5 - 16 oz jars of apricot jelly

This morning I set to simmer a big pot of apricot chutney using about 4# of apricots, and I have about 28 choice apricot halves which I am going to candy tomorrow, and then dip in chocolate. Hopefully my kitty/housesitter won't eat all of them while I am on vacation!

I love Freecycle. I love neighbors and neighborhoods with fruit trees.

GARDEN: This evening, I returned at the same time as a neigbor just to the other side -- offered her some volunteer tomato plants. I gave her the three I dug up and put in water last Thursday, and dug up 3 or 4 more. I apologized that they were volunteers so I couldn't tell her if they were cherry or regular tomatoes and she said, "That's the fun part -- it'll be a surprise!"

The baby basil sprouts are looking great. The catnip isn't looking so great - but I found out why: George. Here, I thought I had over fertilized it or under or over watered. I caught him bent over into the pot, cleaning the last leaves off the thing. He's pretty darned ferocious when it comes to catnip and feathery toys. He could totally kick Dobson's butt, and yet he's so gentle with him and often ends up losing tufts of fur in their wrestling matches.

Time to round up the kitties and bike to Berkeley for dinner with my sweetie. I promise a post on a recent rash of thefts in this neighborhood due to war and recession.

Plum Tuckered!

GARDENING GOODNESS: Today I finally tied up every single tomato plant and pinched suckers and leaves along the bottoms of all tomatoes in the ground. I finished off the evening by giving them all a special fertilizer drink (and the rose bush, too! I want more roses outta you, sucker, so I can make my own rosewater!). I pulled a lot of weeds - the kitties even helped by biting on some of them.

I finally broke down and KILLED some tomato plants - that's right. I killed four volunteers so that my heirlooms have space. I also put a volunteer in a little pot for a neighbor, and three other volunteers are in a big bowl with a bit of water, hoping they survive so she can plant them.

Now I'm down to about 52 plants altogether (including volunteers). I also broke down and laid out a black plastic bag on the ground for the peppers to try to generate more heat, and took out my shiny silver hot water tank insulation which I use to insulate my ice chest on desert camping trips -- I nailed it up on the fence on the north side of the garden, and a smaller piece on the east side near the pepper plants.

I'm in so much trouble - there are flowers on every single tomato plant. Even the "late" plants. The "early" plants haven't popped tomatoes yet - but there are about six tomatoes on different plants, the biggest is about the size of a super ball. One of the Principe Borghese plants has a cute little green plum tomato, it's so cute... I had better get going on building a solar dehydrator. What is it about the way new projects pop up all the time?

MORE PLUM JELLY: After cleaning up from the garden, I boiled up the gallon of plum juice - stored in the fridge in two half-gallon Napa Valley Olive Oil Manufactory olive oil jugs... that takes up a lot of space. I did one batch just plain, straight-up plum and the other I simmered with a couple sticks of cinnamon, 8 cloves, 5 white peppercorns, three star anise, and 5 green cardamom pods, and used half unbleached cane sugar (my standard house sugar) with half rapadura for a more molassses/jaggery taste (since I was using chai spices). Guess which version I like better? The version with the simmered spices -- strained out before adding the sugar -- tastes amazing.

And, this time, I followed the instructions on the box of "Pomona's Pectin" from Whole Foods -- I love how the label says "now you are free to use less sugar!" -- which is nice, and healthier. The plain plum jelly tastes a bit tart but that's not a bad thing. I might use all rapadura/demerara in the next batch of fruit jelly (it might be too dark for lavender, basil or mint jelly).

PLUM JELLY:
1 - 12 oz
6 - 8 oz
3 - 4 oz

PLUM SPICE JELLY:
3 - 8 oz
7 - 4 oz
1 - 8 oz pyrex icebox dish with lid for me to eat!

Time to go pick more plums...

MORE BACKYARD FRUIT OPTIONS: The owner of the house next door lives, I discovered today, one street over. She has a big tree with Valencia oranges and a giant Concord grape arbor in her back yard. She promised I could take grapes for jelly and Oranges for -- well, to keep them from falling and making her yard a mess, I suppose. They are still yellow like lemons, but she's got about 500 oranges on this tree and they are all about 8' or more off the ground -- I'm going to have to get a BIG ladder. Or a fruit basket...

Time to go clean up the kitchen so I can get to bed early enough to go swimming at 5:45.

FREE THE LADYBUGS: Released a pint of ladybugs around 11pm -- earlier in the day I found a black beetle had covered a broccoli rab with all kinds of grey fuzzy looking eggy things, so pulled it up and scooped out some of the dirt around the rab. Also found ants in the chard, so the ladybugs should take care of this. I did find quite a few lady bugs in the garden while I was working (and also on the plum tree when I picked plums, and on the bush that I trimmed). I will just keep releasing ladybugs until you can't go into my backyard without seeing them there.

A Plum Massacre

I confess - I probably overdid it, but it wasn't entirely my fault. You see, last year, I looked out the window one day in the 2nd or 3rd week of July and thought, "holy cow! I gotta pick the plums!" I managed to fill up a 5 gallon bucket plus a big size bowl with every single plum off the tree. I am not joking -- I picked the tree clean last year.

Yesterday afternoon, I got out the ladder and started picking. And picking. And picking. I ended up with about 20 or 30 gallons of plums. There are still a lot more plums. The goal in picking all the plums is to avoid waste of perfectly good fruit and to avoid having to clean up rotten, squishy plums out of my garden and off the ground and yard furnitures.

So, I got cleaning and cooking. I ended up with 3 gallons (maybe more) of plum juice. I also ended up with about 1/2 gallon of plum sauce after running the juice through a jelly bag. I made a batch of plum habanero jelly with 16 cups of juice (and 18 cups of sugar), and plum lavender jelly (8 cups of juice, 9 cups of sugar). I used Pomona's Pectin and therein lies the rub... stuff is not setting properly.

I cooked everything down a LOT. I even overboiled a couple times and probably lost about 5 cups of jelly on the stovetop. The plum lavender jelly is setting a bit better than the plum habanero but since I finished that at midnight, I'll give it another day (and an overnight in the fridge) to gauge the set. The plum habanero tastes a bit hotter than last year - I used 8 habaneros (started with 4 but it wasn't spicy enough).

Total haul:

Plum habanero:
7 12 oz jars
8 8 oz jars
9 4 oz jars

Plum lavender:
2 12 oz jars
4 8 oz jars
4 4 oz jars

The plum pulp was used for plum sauce -- I have always wanted to make my own plum sauce, it's sweet, tangy, salty and delicious for dipping egg rolls (which my sweetie & I first made two weeks ago). I read some recipes and threw this together in a pot:

1 chopped up onion
2 star anise
4 cloves
3 chopped cloves of garlic
1/4 c. soy
1/4 c. rice vinegar
1/4 c. apple cider vinegar
2 c. unrefined cane sugar
1 t chili flakes
1 c. water

I simmered that and added 4 c. of the plum sauce, then simmered some more and added the rest of the plum sauce and a couple ladles of the hot plum habanero jelly. I threw in another half cup of brown sugar and a cup or so of demerara sugar just to be safe. Plum sauce is darned sweet.

At midnight, I ended up with a Dutch oven totally full of about 8 cups of plum sauce. This sauce smells and tastes like some kind of insanely non-tomato-based BBQ sauce. I'm going to re-taste it after leaving it chill for 24 hours and decide if I want to continue doctoring and cooking it, maybe puree it in the blender and then seal it in jars. I cannot wait to put this on portobella mushrooms on the fire!

I still have two half-gallon bottles of plum juice for more jelly. Guess what everyone's getting for gifts for the next six months?

I also plan to make a batch of lavender jelly once I get through the plum stuff. I have so much mint that I will also make mint jelly and plan to make both mint basil jelly and mint basil pesto once the basil is big enough to harvest.

James pulled up a couple of cilantro plants -- I should have been making cilantro-pumpkin seed pesto instead of reading blogs tonight... oops! It was so quiet over there in the bowl of water by the window!