Wild Plum Jelly

I made my plum jelly last Friday, and I think it turned out pretty good. I love the warm color that it is, especially when the light is shining through it. It taste's pretty good, if I can get past the strange way it seems to "dry" my mouth and tongue out. It's not really dry, just feels odd, but I guess that's the way the plums are when you eat them, so it's the way the jelly will be too. We gave a jar to our neighbors and they said it was good and tasted like wild plums. :)

I don't know why I enjoy canning things as much as I do, but it's kinda fun. Especially when they look nice in the jar, like this jelly does. I'm not to sure I'd want to do 100's of jars of it...but a few now and then is enjoyable. Course we don't eat enough jelly to make THAT much anyway...I think that would last us for years. *giggle*

I had to get some juice/pulp to be able to make the jelly and at first I was planning on using my Foley Food Mill to get the pulp out of the plumbs, but that ended up not working all that well, so between DH and I we came up with the idea to just cook the plums in water...mashing them as they boiled. After cooking for a while and mashing them a lot as they cooked, I strained the seeds, skin, and what pulp wasn't small enough to go through the holes of my colander, then used the juice/pulp to make the jelly. I only made one batch of jelly (6 c. juice/pulp, 1 pkg sure jell, and 8 cups sugar) and the rest of the juice I canned so I could make more jelly later, if I decide to. With us not using all that much jelly, I didn't figure I needed to make to much at one time. Plus it takes way to much sugar, so I didn't want to go broke buying sugar! *giggle*

All in all, once I figured out how to get some of the pulp and juice I enjoyed the process...and can't wait to be able to try another kind one of these days...if I ever get some other kind of fruit to try some. I got 12 jelly jars of jelly, and 7 qt of juice which isn't to bad from 2/3's of a bucket of wild plumbs. Now if we could just find some chokecherry's...I remember Grandma making chokecherry jelly in Minnesota and that is my all time favorite jelly!! DH remembers his Mom making it too and agrees it's the best. Unfortunately people seem to have gotten rid of their chokecherry trees around here for some reason.

Well not much going on today, I've had a pain in the neck (no not the people kind *giggle*) for the past couple days, so I haven't really been doing much...trying to not move wrong so it hurts is hard if you are up working. I'm sure it will go away eventually. I haven't managed to get back into scrapping though...and am going to have to make myself do that soon I think. LOL Hopefully I'll be canning pears later this week though, so maybe that will wait another week or two.

Hope everyone had a good weekend, we had a nice slow lazy one here. It's still cool enough to not have the air on which is wonderful because we get to have the windows open...although last I looked it was suppose to warm up a little this week. Saturday DH listened to the first Husker game of the season and in the middle of it our electricity went out...thankfully he has a battery powered radio so he didn't miss anything. I enjoyed the smell of our Kerosene lamps...which brings back lots of good memories, till bedtime. :)

Well I better get off here and find some lunch, have a great week and thanks so much for your comments. :)