Spiced Italian Plum Butter - Worth The Effort To Preserve

I revel in seasonal changes. However, my favorite time is when the harvest of Summer starts rolling into the market. It always seems to drive me to action, a hard thing to do at my age because it is getting more costly to process fresh food not just in coin but in the physical effort.

That is why I am happy my youngest daughter has taken an interest in these old food preserving skills. It will remind her of our time together in the kitchen laughing and chopping and cooking.

I enjoy the warm months by watching the fruit and berries arrive in June and July. Before you know it will be the stone fruits of August. Then all the vegetables I love. It is like a cascade of local farmers' delights.

Tomatoes, carrots, potatoes peppers, and eggplants all represent a month of the summer to me. I look at a half bushel of beautiful red peppers and imagine the aroma in the kitchen when I roast them, or the bushels of tomatoes roasting and being milled into the marvels of pasta sauce. I sigh at the pleasure of it all.

Today let me share a recipe I tried for a spiced plum sauce from a post on the Food In Jars website:

http://foodinjars.com/2012/09/my-berlin-kitchen-giveaway-spiced-plum-butter/

It is delicious, it is not overly sweet. I can hear angels singing. I really liked that I could leave them overnight to macerate, and then roast them the next day in the oven. It really freed up space in the kitchen. Once they were cooked, I used my hand blender and voila it was done. I canned some and I froze some. I want to see the difference in the texture between the two. 

~ Mum