Over Labor Day weekend half the household was sick, and the rest appeared to be heading in the same direction. In a sense, I’m glad we didn’t make plans for the long weekend, since we wouldn’t have been able to keep them.
So instead of going anywhere, we stayed close to home and did some cooking and baking. I like baking, but I wouldn’t say I do a lot of it, and cooking is quite unusual for me, but we have a plum tree in our back yard and our neighbor gifted us with a lot of tomatoes. What was I to do?
First up, I decided to make fresh tomato sauce. I used this recipe with the Instant Pot. We picked up some fresh carrots and onions at the local farmers market, and used the fresh tomatoes we had.
The cooking method meant I didn’t have to chop things too finely, they cooked up nicely and then a handheld immersion blender made short work of the cooked vegetables, quickly turning them into a sauce. The handheld immersion blender was a purchase for this project, but one that I am quite impressed with. When I saw all those whole vegetables in the pot I wasn’t sure how they’d turn into a sauce, but it worked great! And a small can of tomato paste brought it all together.
Honestly it was a bit bland, but it was a solid tomato sauce that I’ve been enjoying. It only used half our tomatoes though, so the next day I decided to try and make a more spicy version with several hot peppers, and made an overly spicy version. Oops. I froze most of that sauce, but honestly I’m not sure if we’ll end up eating all of it.
Next up was going out to our plum tree! We have way too many plums, our poor tree is being weighed down by them. But the boys and I went and gathered a harvest, even though it barely put a dent in the bounty.
We took them all inside, rinsed them, and I got to work on turning the first 2lbs of them into a jar and a half of plum jam (recipe), and then later did another 2lbs for a total of 3 jars. I’ll mention now that I’m not actually a raw plum enthusiast. I’ll eat a couple here and there, but that’s about it. Plum jam, on the other hand, is a sweet delicacy that I’m very much enjoying!
It’s also easier than I thought to make jam. I think I’d always known this in the abstract, but a jar of jam from the store is not very expensive, fresh fruit is expensive, and there’s the time invested in cutting up dozens of tiny plums, simmering them, and then cleaning up the mess afterwards. I’ll probably do it again just so the fruit doesn’t go to waste and because it was a fun activity to do with the boys.
Finally, the dessert! I decided to make plum cobbler (recipe). Like the jam, the plums in the cobbler cook up very nicely and end up being a dish that I had an unexpected fondness for. But at 8 cups of plums, it’s a big dish, and I think we all tired of it after a couple days. Maybe I’ll do a smaller batch or plan with larger pool of diners if I do it again.
It turned into a nice way to spend the long weekend, and by the end of the weekend we were starting to feel a bit better. This particular illness came in waves that hit us all pretty hard and caused a couple nights of very little sleep for us parents. But at least we had some tasty things to enjoy!