One thing that most of my friends already know about me (and who else, really, is reading this blog) is that I’m an industrious cook. I’m not sure where the desire to cook originated, maybe from my mother’s refusal to cook anything interesting when I was a child or maybe it’s a past life memory. My urge to try new recipes, almost to the point of physical exhaustion, my love of and access to seasonal, local produce, and a borderline-neurotic refusal to throw any edible produce away usually combine to produce at least one if not more dishes on a daily basis from my teeny, tiny kitchen. On average, I prepare three times the amount of food I can consume, and have been known to give a portion of whatever I’ve made away to friends regularly.
My cooking picks up speed in the summer months as I work to catch up with the fruits and vegetables I’m so lucky to receive, whether through my friend Rob Brown, through the bounty of Monticello’s gardens and orchards or through my own foraging and picking. This year began with a surprise harvest of black mulberries, fat from the wet winter. I’ve worked through harvests of black currants, sweet and sour cherries, rhubarb, and not enough raspberries, blackberries and strawberries. Now it’s peaches, figs, apples and plums. Some of the fruit I’ve used for baking, some I’ve frozen (the blackberries will make the autumn’s apple pies taste terrific, and I have enough sour cherries for one more pie), some I’ve soaked in alcohol (there’s just not enough of my cherry vodka cordial to go around), some I’ve dried in my friend Rachel’s dehydrator (the white peaches turned out fabulously), and some I’ve used to make jams, jellies, and preserves. And that’s just the fruit. The vegetables I can’t turn into lunch or dinner I’ve frozen or pickled (cucumbers and caponata), made romesco and tomato sauce and even tomato jam.
This week’s challenge has been how to use the 10 pounds of plums I received from Monticello. So far I’ve made a plum chutney, an upside-down plum cake, and a plum-apple-jalapeno jelly. Tonight I will force myself to use the rest of the plums by making a simple plum jam. This will be a different recipe than the one I made about a month ago with rhubarb, tart enough to send my Scandanavian grandmother for her 91st birthday. I can’t make it earlier in the day because I need to buy more canning jars. Somehow I’ve managed to go through every single one.