Finding Time for Fruit

I picked a 5 gallon bucket of Italian plums last Friday before we left for the weekend; I haven't forgotten how a few years ago we left them, almost ripe, on the tree while we went camping for the weekend, and when we returned, the tree was completely bare - squirrels!! Sure enough, I took a break on Friday and when I came back a squirrel was trying to get what he could before I came back. So I left him a couple and took the rest. They're sitting in the bucket in the basement for later this week when I have time to make jam.

I also bottled up the cherry liqueur on Friday before we left for the weekend. Turns out that with a quart of cherries soaking in vodka, after you filter the cherries out and then filter it through a cloth (a coffee filter won't work, the gooey stuff keeps the liquid from filtering through), add in the 5 oz. of simple syrup, and top it off with water, you'll end up with about 26 ounces of liqueur, or, if you like it a little less strong, about a quart (32 oz.) of liqueur. We taste tested it right away and thought it was pretty delicious all by itself. In a few weeks we'll try it again and see if it has changed any.

Walt helped me process the few pears that were ripe on Friday, we just peeled and quartered and cored them, and put them into a light syrup in a glass jar, which I put in the microwave for a few minutes and then put in the fridge. So they are like canned pears, but not actually canned. We like the flavor and consistency of the canned pears so thought I'd replicate it without all the major work. But now all the pears sitting on a blanket on the floor of the garage are ripe all at once, so we'll have to do the real canning process, and very soon. Probably tomorrow! Thank goodness the apples will wait a little longer.

We got our freezer lamb from SkyLines last week, and this coming weekend is chicken processing at Zakarison's. We're getting 20 birds for the freezer. Eric says he has a new defeathering machine, even faster than the old defeathering machine, that will make it possible for us to do 20 birds in just over 2 hours. Wow. That many used to take us 1/2 a day. I'll report in afterwards. Combined with a sale on Country Natural beef from Oregon that's going on at the Co-op this week, the freezer is rapidly filling up, and that feels great.