Bumper crop

We finally had a little rain yesterday.  Not nearly enough to water the parched garden, but it sounded pretty and smelled so good sprinkling the dry-as-straw lawn.  Listen to me. I'm usually whining about rain (or something else) but this cool and cloudy week is the first since early June, so it feels like a novelty.

Here's another thing I'm not complaining about-- our bumper crop of perfect plums. But what to do with them?  Farm girls don't waste their home grown fruit, and it's been years since we had a nice crop.

John wants a baked plum kuchen, and I have an old Gourmet magazine recipe for a tricky but delicious plum jam. Or, if I feel ambitious, I could can some in pint jars with sugar syrup-- good on yogurt or cottage cheese for breakfast in the winter. And my friend Candi once gave me a recipe for plum ketchup -- and so on. All of this of course is a lot of mess and kitchen work.

Over the weekend I brought the heavy bucket in the house to finish ripening, and along with it came a Biblical plague of fruit flies jumping into our wine glasses and spiders weaving webs on the furniture.  Guess that's the price you pay for "organic."  Well, they're back out on the deck tonight, and if the raccoons don't eat them?