What to do when you have 12 kg of red plums?

I have a red plum tree in my garden and this year was very fruitful! I ended up with 12 kg of plums, without counting the ones I couldn’t reach with the ladder!

What do you do with all these juicy plums? Easy give them away! “Hey mom, happy early birthday. Here is your gift” and you hand her a 9kg batch. 😜

I’m just kidding. I did give most of them away, to friends mostly. Until I was left with a reasonable amount to work with. So I decided I was going to make a plum jam. First time trying the jam making might I add. I looked up a recipe that I could actually make, seeing that most of them had ingredients that I did not have, nor could I substitute them with anything else. And voilà.

Plums washed, cut, cores removed. Tossed the chunks in the pot with sugar and lemon juice. For 2 kg of plums the recipe stated you needed the juices of 2 lemons and 1.6kg of sugar. I decided to put 1kg sugar because I didn’t want the jam to be too sweet. I’m more of a sour person.

Let the cooking begin.

It is an endless task of stirring. I think if you switch hands for time to time, you can probably skip arms day at the gym. I promise you, you will come out of  it with biceps and triceps and whatever the muscle in your forearm is called as developed as can be!

Time to put that magic potion in to the jars. The colour was very nice and the smell was there too. My only concern was that it was too runny. Maybe it would thicken as it cools down? But hey who cares, I was so happy nothing burned!

First jar went to my parents’ place, second jar to my friend’s and the third was for me to enjoy.

 

As it turned out the jam was too liquid, so i thought I’d use it as a coulis instead. And since i had some left-over baguette i decided to make a red plum pain perdu. 

Back to the kitchen. I mixed all the ingredients, stirred in the bread and the cut plums. I wanted to add a little more taste so i reached for my spices and took what i thought was the cinnamon. Mixed it all up and popped it in the preheated oven. It smelled so good and it looked very nice!

I cut off a piece and took a bite and it tasted off. Something was not right. It didn’t taste that good. I added the jam on top of another piece and tried again, but still… what have i done wrong??

I went back to the kitchen and took a look at the recipe again. I did everything right. The only extra was the cinnamon. Could it be? So i grabbed the spice jar i used and took a pinch to taste it. Turns out it was not cinnamon AT ALL. It was a spice called “7 spices”, most commonly used for making “kebbeh”. The only reason why there was ahint of cinnamon in the smell was because the jar previously contained cinnamon!

So to you, my fellow readers, i say this:

ALWAYS LABEL YOUR SPICE JARS or just simply TASTE the spice before using it, no matter how sure you are that it’s what you are looking for!