Pears, Plums, and Apples Oh My

The plums, the pears, the apples, they’re all waiting for me now, falling off the trees in anticipation of being turned into jam, into sauce, into slightly sweetened preserved fruit with essence of vanilla, just enough to make you breathe deep when you open the bottle, aah.

Walt picked a bushel of each.

The cherry liqueur is ready for bottling. I need to get some pretty corked bottles for it, and then we’ll tuck them away until November or so.

The lamb we ordered from Melissa Lines at SkyLines Farm will be ready for us later this week. I’m really looking forward to having that in the freezer. In anticipation I made my own version of seven-hour leg of lamb today with some I’d gotten from a friend a couple weeks ago; I browned it in olive oil and put it in the crock pot with about ½ an inch of water. I sautéed in the same pan a diced onion, two diced carrots, and a diced tomato, with some rosemary and mint, and added the browned veggies to the crock pot, and put on the lid. I left it on low from 7 am until 5 pm and then turned it down to keep warm. It was fabulously tender and delicious, absolutely the best lamb I’ve ever done. Alongside garlic parsley mashed potatoes made from new potatoes, and a salad, it was one of the more successful meals we’ve had in a while.

Our nephew Steve came to dinner to get a change from UI dorm food and he was gratifyingly grateful for the home-cooked meal. We topped it off with some European cheeses, a Dutch cheese with nettles, a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese from the Pyrenees with peppercorns in it, some domestic blue, and some Morbier from France, with the layer of ash in the middle – but next time in keeping with the locavore theme I’ll try some just from the Pacific Northwest. I bought a Ste Chapelle wine that was cheap, a “soft red”, thinking it’d be just the thing, but I didn’t realize that “soft” means “sweet.” Next time I’ll go with the pinot noir from Oregon or the Okanagan...