I slept late this morning and when I did get out of bed, brush my teeth, comb my hair and get dressed I sat and checked my email even before I went looking for a cup of coffee. Sometimes I'm a slow starter. Anyway it occurred to me that Lisa had been up for a while and was busy getting mom up rather than working on breakfast, even though she always wakes up starving so I decided she should have some banana nut pancakes (a particular favorite). She saw what I was doing and suggested I add a couple of the fresh peaches our friend Pam brought us and, just for grins, I microwaved a handfull of dehyrated apricots in a half cup of water and threw them in too.
We got several batches of plums from our neighbor's tree this year and after I worked up the last batch I had seven cups of juice. It takes six cups to make plum jelly and I already had several batches put up but I hated the thought of having an entire cup of juice left over so I divided what I had into two 3½ cup batches, put one of them in the fridge in a covered container, added 2½ cups of unsweetened apple juice to what I had left and simply followed the directions for plum jelly. It didn't set so I wound up with four pints of plum syrup.
A few days later I made a wheat-free chocolate cake. Powdered sugar contains corn syrup and corn products are highly toxic to Lisa so a traditional butter cream frosting, consisting of powdered sugar and butter, is out of the question. We've tried to produce a decent frosting using regular sugar but we've had no luck so far with that. Then I remembered the "plum sauce" I got from my last attempt at jelly so I opened a jar and poured that over the cake. Wow! Serendipity is sometimes good stuff you know? So, yesterday I remembered the 3½ cups of plum juice which was in the fridge, even though I'd intended to throw it away when my last batch of jelly didn't set but, having discovered "plum syrup", I got everything together and made myself another batch and that's what we had on our peach-apricot-banana-pecan pancakes this morning. Life is good y'all.
Don Crowder
We got several batches of plums from our neighbor's tree this year and after I worked up the last batch I had seven cups of juice. It takes six cups to make plum jelly and I already had several batches put up but I hated the thought of having an entire cup of juice left over so I divided what I had into two 3½ cup batches, put one of them in the fridge in a covered container, added 2½ cups of unsweetened apple juice to what I had left and simply followed the directions for plum jelly. It didn't set so I wound up with four pints of plum syrup.
A few days later I made a wheat-free chocolate cake. Powdered sugar contains corn syrup and corn products are highly toxic to Lisa so a traditional butter cream frosting, consisting of powdered sugar and butter, is out of the question. We've tried to produce a decent frosting using regular sugar but we've had no luck so far with that. Then I remembered the "plum sauce" I got from my last attempt at jelly so I opened a jar and poured that over the cake. Wow! Serendipity is sometimes good stuff you know? So, yesterday I remembered the 3½ cups of plum juice which was in the fridge, even though I'd intended to throw it away when my last batch of jelly didn't set but, having discovered "plum syrup", I got everything together and made myself another batch and that's what we had on our peach-apricot-banana-pecan pancakes this morning. Life is good y'all.
Don Crowder
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