What it feels like to be rich (Another plum-post)

Yesterday Maren and I decided to take full advantage of harvest-season. We had gotten green light from the owner to take of the old plum-trees we talked about in a previous post to take as much fruit as we could. Since he works abroad he was not going to use any this year. We took a crate, and a ladder, and after half an hour of picking and shaking the tree a bit we had gathered what we later determined to be just over 20 kilograms of fruit. In our eyes, that approaches infinite. A rich feeling indeed.

Hours were spent preserving half of the fruit yesterday. We used a "Juice Boiler" to make ca. 8 liters of concentrated juice, and boiled that with sugar to make a syrup. A juice boiler is a brilliant thing to make juice of pretty much everything you wish. It consists of a bottom-pan in which you boil water, and a top-pan and collander where the steam passes trough and the juice is collected.

We have roughly made 8 liters of syrup that we can blend out with water (1:4) to drink over the coming year. We also took the opportunity to make a nice liqueur from some. At this point we were not halfway through the pile yet, so we went on to make pie-filling to add to the stock in the pantry. While we were at it, we made an oatmeal-plum-pie for dessert. 

 

The picture above shows the remain we have in the fridge at the moment. We are giving away as much fruit as people want to have, and are planning on preserving more in the way of jams and perhaps dried fruit. It is a shame my brewing equipment is already in use with the plum-wine we started some weeks back, otherwise it would be nice to make some more of that as well. Needless to say we like harvest-season.