mountainjam.us

There grows in our neighbor’s yard, a tree whose branches droop well into our yard and produce hundreds of small little fruits. They start out as beautiful white blooms, then develop into fruit which starts out green, then as it ripens, turns pink then purple.

Mystery Plums

I have yet to positively identify this tree, but as far as I can tell it is a variety of plum. The fruit, when it’s not ripe, is quite sour. But once it ripens, it has a wonderfully sweet flavor.

The plums themselves are small – only about an inch in size – so there is not much to them. I collected about hundred yesterday, so today I’m looking for something to do with them.

I cut open a few last night to see what the insides look like at various stages of ripeness. The under ripe ones have a bright orange center, while the over ripe ones get very soft and almost rotten looking. The ripe ones look pinkish purple and taste great.

Since last night they have changed colors dramatically so it seems they ripen fast and have a short window of usability. Better find a recipe fast.

UPDATE

After plenty of searching I still have not found a recipe that seems suitable. Most plum recipes call for plum jam. In order to make plum jam, I need to be willing to go through the canning process, which I am not. But nature waits for no man, and the plums were ripe and ready for processing. So last night, after preparing dinner and serving 4 thirteen-year-old girls, Adi, Jayli, and Lisa, I fixed myself a cocktail and sat down to pit about a hundred little plums.

45 minutes later, I had a respectable pile of plums. Adi picked out a couple pieces and declared them “the goodest thing ever.” A food compliment from a picky five-year-old is always a good sign. I noticed that, despite being picked at the same time, the plums were at various stages of ripeness. The colors were not too different, but the inside textures were slightly different. The flavors ranged from very tart to very sweet. I’m guessing Adi picked out the sweet ones in her initial taste tests.

After removing all the pits, and armed with a healthy stash of plums, I prepped the VitaMix for duty. Literally about a minute later, I had a luscious red paste, ready for some exquisite use. The paste had a bit of a smoothie texture to it. It would flow if tipped, but very slowly. The taste was much more tart than I was expecting. I called Adi over to sample a taste. As her face squinched into a pucker, she muttered through pursed lips, “What did you do to it, Daddy?” Nice.

Plum Puree

Labor Day Weekend and Kenzey has soccer games every morning at 8:30 and the place is an hour away. That means early departures and that is not conducive to the happiness of 3 year olds. With that, we agreed Lisa would take Kenz and Adi to the game and I would manage Jayli. And I do mean manage. There is no “watching” Jayli. Since she had a full head of steam and nothing to do, I thought we should go to the lake and explore for awhile.

These little trips always produce plenty of “Kodak” moments, plus there was the golden sun of morning still lingering around, so I had to bring my camera.

view across the lake with the Flatirons in the background

Crown Hill Park in the morning is a beautiful place to be. The lake is usually very calm, there are all kinds of birds to see and hear. The view of the Flatirons is quite amazing as well.

One on one time with any of the kids is a great time. They are so different when they are not competing for attention or torturing one another. Jayli is pure smiles and happiness with seemingly endless energy.

She loves to run and bounce and skip all over. I didn’t bother bringing any scooters or bikes or anything, and I didn’t even have a destination in mind as we began our walk. We picked a path that we had been down before and was known to have plenty of grasshoppers for the chasing.

We spent the next hour just poking around, checking stuff out, laughing, smiling and just enjoying our time together.

Dragonfly with a bent tail

We even had the fortune of a dragonfly who wanted us to see it up close.

Daddy/Daughter good times.

This year we planted sunflowers along the driveway fence. They, like the rest of the garden, were slow to take off. Late as these blooms may have come (and are still coming), they are very pretty nonetheless. In the morning sun they look the best, so I had to take a few shots the other day.

click for the big shot

I brought out my 70-300 lens and was zoomed in as close as I could be to a large bumblebee working very hard at gathering pollen. The bee had been there a number of seconds and was working hard, minding its own business, when out of nowhere, a yellow jacket came screaming in, landed on the back of the bumblebee and began stinging it! At the time I had no real idea what was going on, but when I downloaded the images, I was glad I kept pressing the shutter. I got the approach and the bee on bee attack.

I managed to get some other fun shots of the sunflowers. They really are magnificently strange flowers. From the slump in their backs as their seeds heads form and grow heavy, to the moire patterned centers, they are one of my favorite flowers.

Peekaboo

Good Morning Sunshine

Rising Sunflower

Honestly, I did not expect to harvest much from our garden this year, but we did end up with some great tomatoes. Too many to use at once, really. I was looking for tomato recipes and saw a few which called for sundried tomatoes. I had never thought about it before, but decided to look into learning about how they are prepared. Turned out it’s a very simple process, it just takes time.

Rows of toms sitting in the sun

I quartered a bunch of the medium sized tomatoes and put them on a cooling rack that I use for cookies, set them out in the sun for a couple days and, lo and behold, I had sundried tomatoes. They were not as dry as I expected after that amount of time in the dry Colorado air and sun, so I finished off the first batch in the oven.

For the second batch I put some salt on the fresh slices. This seemed to really accelerate the process. That batch dried out perfectly in two days. I stuffed them into a jar, threw in a dash of Italian seasoning, and filled it with olive oil. It makes a great looking jar, but it’s definitely not enough to last the winter…time for batch three.

The Final Product

Time for a change to the old website. I’m going to try a Blog format and see how this goes. I am hoping I can share pics and vids without too much trouble.