Plum Butter and Crumpets
About ten days ago or so the city of Fort Collins began spraying for mosquitoes as we already had several reported cases of West Nile Virus in town. The city web page advised closing all windows and shutting off AC if you had it. They also said to cover your garden. Well, we can’t cover the plum or apple tree so I went out and pulled the largest and softest plums. I only got a little bit picked before we heard the truck on our street. But by the end of last week the plums we hadn’t just eaten were nearing over-ripeness. Luckily it coincided with a slight reprieve in the heat so I cooked up a batch of plum butter.
If you knew me in person you’d know I’m all about the fruit butters - pumpkin, apple, peach, plum. It doesn’t matter! Okay, so I’m particularly partial to pumpkin. Which reminds me - next year the garden has to have a few pumpkin vines! I consulted the queen of preserving and baking, Bakerina and she pointed me in the proper direction. Our plums are *very* red fleshed with tart, deep purple skin. The flesh is very sweet and very juicy when fully ripened. I was a little disappointed in how much the butter darkened. For a long while it had appeared it was going to remain the rich red it was when blended. Next I think I’ll either leave out the spices or cut back a lot as that is the first flavor to hit your tongue and you need to concentrate a bit to really taste the plum.
We only had about 1.25 pounds at this point. So I just did a small batch, which really was perfect for me to try out the recipe. We started with ~3.5 cups of puree, which ultimately cooked down to 1.5 cups! It also meant that I didn’t have enough to bother canning so we needed to start using it right now as it’ll only be good in the fridge for about a month. So, to aid in using it I made up a batch of crumpets on Monday morning since they are made on the stove top rather than baking so it wouldn’t heat the house too much. Though I have to say I forgot how time consuming crumpets are to cook.
But, it was worth the standing at the stove to cook the crumpets! Ah, the toasted little disks are perfect with the plum butter! I’d love to have some scones with the plum butter too, but I don’t think we’re prepared to turn on the oven yet. The crumpet recipe I got out of one of Drew’s cookbooks - The Afternoon Tea Book by Michael Smith. It yielded 25 3-inch crumpets.
There are a ton of plums still on the tree and oddly they don’t seem particularly more ripe than 10 days ago. We’ve had real rain since the last spray and the half-life of the spray is 10 days. The research I did said the spray they used was fine near stone fruit trees as well as apple trees. So in the next few weeks I plan to pick the tree as clean as I can and make more plum butter to can this time - after much washing of the fruit. I don’t particularly enjoy canning, but I have to say it is wonderful to get to share things like this with our families and friends who aren’t near enough to just pop over for a crumpet and some tea.
