Plums plums plums!

We have had an abundance of plums this year on our plum tree. For the first few years you could count the number of plums on one hand, and then the birds would eat most of them before they were quite ripe! But this year we have a MEGA crop!

So buoyed by the success of the strawberry/raspberry jam we have made (about 4 batches now so far), and the apricot jam my H made recently, we decided we had enough jam really, so we*made plum sauce. After consulting "Stephanie" (The Cook's companion book of course), the CWA cookbook and the internet, my H decided that Stephanie was the way to go ( it is the cooking bible after all!). We had been saving bottles for a while ready to make tomato sauce - still planning too, but will have to find some more bottles now! 

Of course, and over ripe plums, or ones that the local birds did have a nibble of, were happily eaten by the chooks. So much so that we had to limit their intake to a few plums every other day!

The end result - about 8 bottles of plum sauce! We are supposed to wait a week now before eating it, but had to have a quick taste last night while making it, and it was YUMMO! just the right mix of sweet/tart, not too vinegary (unlike the Piccalilli we made last year which really needed the 6 weeks of sitting before eating, it was waaay too heavy on the vinegar at first taste as we made it, thankfully it is quite yummy now - still tart but not horrible like it was as first! 

Looking forward to  some delicious stir frys & burgers next week to try out the plum sauce now!

* I say "we made" but in reality my H did most of the work making the plum sauce, I just helped out - including making the emergency dash to the supermarket to buy a funnel when we realised all our funnels have ending up in the shed as they tend to disapear out there to  get used for various science experiments and I do not want them back in the kitchen again after that!