How to Make Purple Plum Leather

The Isle river which passes close to Montpon, a village in the Dordogne region, has a pastoral aspect that's soft and inviting.

The Isle river near Montpon, about an hour's drive from us

We were at Montpon to prepare for the arrival of some family members at their gite.  As we had a hard time finding the place, the Calm One set up a paper-towel flag to help them find their holiday home.

This building appears to have original half-timbered walls so I am  guessing it is several hundreds of years old.  And no, that is not their gite!

Since it was blackberry season, I had an eye out for wild bushes.  My eyes lit up when I found these bushes, but the super sharp Yucca spikes guarding them made me realize despite my being a blackberry addict, no way was I going to slash my arms to get to them.  I hope any birds interested in them were careful.

We did not stay long as not to get in the way.  Also, though Monsieur and Madame M kept a careful eye on both Dayo and the garden, they were all on my mind because an unrelenting heat wave in the blasting furnace category would not let up.  Before our departure, I had moved the many pots from the marble garden table into shade.  Upon our return, I accepted how inconsiderate I was by not keeping that surface free sooner.  It was embarrassingly obvious how deprived Dayo had been. 

A calm but alert Dayo surveying all that is his

The plum d'ente tree like most of my fruit trees this season put out a much smaller harvest than usual.

As I already made plum jam with a much more ample harvest of Mirabelles, and as The Calm One likes purple plum leather, purple plum leather it will be.  Fruit leather is an effective way to preserve lots of fruit.  Wash, pit, and chop plums.

Add 1/2 water to four cups of chopped, pitted fruit.  Let it simmer gently for about 10 to 15 minutes until tender, mashing here and there.

Start with a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of fresh lemon juice for each four cups of plums. Stop adding lemon juice when you can begin to detect a slight 'burn' when tasting.  Add some freshly grated nutmeg and ground cinnamon to taste.  Cook another ten minutes until thickened.

Sieve through a Foley mill.

If not convenient to use the puree soon, freeze it.  Line shallow baking pans with oven-safe plastic wrap.  Silipat or its equivalent can be used as plastic wrap tends to flap over the leather as it is drying in the oven, especially in convection ones, which causes the leather to stay moist along the edges and corners making its removal a bit tricky.  In that case, cut off the sticky bits and then pull the remaining leather away from the plastic.  Oiled parchment paper has been suggested as an another alternative.  I would test its waterproof worthiness with a small amount of puree overnight in the fridge before actual use.

For my size pans, I pour in about a quart of puree to a 1/4 thickness, using a soft spatula to spread it out evenly.

What a superb burgundy colour!

Place pans in a oven set at 50 degrees C, cracking open the oven door if necessary.  My pans took about twelve hours to dry sufficiently, most of that time was overnight.  If the puree is spread to only an 1/8 inch, it will dry faster, but I personally prefer leather that is thick enough to retain some moisture. When testing if it is ready, touch lightly the whole surface--it needs not to be wet, soft, or sticky.  Slightly tacky is OK.  Be careful not to dry the leather too much or it will become brittle.  If that does happen, it will still be edible, just not possible to roll up.  Peel plastic off and place the leather on parchment paper.

Using scissors, trim any ragged edges and cut the paper-backed leather into strips, roll up, and store in a lidded container in the fridge.  I cut it just like I do fabric, with my left hand holding down the leather while my right hand takes long, clean sweeps with the scissors.  However, leave your sewing scissors in their basket and use only kitchens shears!

All those fresh plums became one medium-sized jar of leather

My leather resembles a thinner, plebeian version of pâte de fruits--it's moist, thick enough, with intense flavour to be considered more like an informal dessert than a snack.  I like having a strip or two with coffee.  The colour is warming on a chilly autumn day also!

How to Make Fresh Basil Pesto...and tomato soup concentrate & gazpacho

The fruit harvest throughout France has been greatly reduced this season. Instead of several bushels of plums,  I have just a few small baskets from our trees.  Happily, I will be able to make a few pots of jam and maybe some fruit leather.

Purple ente plums and mirabelle plums

When I get a little down because of having so much less fruit for preserving, I walk by the Rose of Sharon bushes with their pastel clouds of flowers and immediately feel better.

Dayo, being his own man, likes to wander off by himself in some undisclosed corner, usually tucked away in a veggie bed.  Just as I wonder where he might be, I look down, and there he is, inspecting the basil with me.

Basil is a very attractive green herb with an alluring aroma and taste.  It goes well in many dishes, especially tomato-based ones.  It is simple to grow an ample harvest from seed:  sow in early spring indoors in a plant incubator or on a heat mat and transplant when weather is reliably warm, mid-May in my garden.  Several weeks after transplanting, a new flat of freshly sowed seeds is a good idea, as basil bolts and goes woody, that is, flowers usually by late July which makes basil a bit bitter.  This way, as the first succession is pooping out, you have a nice new planting rearing to go for flavouring late-season tomatoes. For basil to stay bushy, it helps to harvest frequently.  Pinch as soon as there are six leaves--leaving four--and repeat pinching/harvesting.  My preferred method of serving fresh basil is by making a chiffonade.

Basil can be preserved by first washing, then chopping and adding either olive oil or a little water, placing in ice cube trays, freezing, and then separating and putting into freeze bags.  Individual leaves can be frozen also--wash, pat dry, and freeze on a tray, with space in between each leaf, then place leaves in freezer bags.

Since the walnuts grown near Grenoble in southeast France are so good--light golden brown without a touch of bitterness--I use those instead of pine nuts for making pesto.

For a cup of pesto, toss in an 1/3 cup of shelled walnuts into the food processor for a few pulses, then add two cups of washed and dried, packed, fresh basil leaves along with two fat, crushed garlic cloves and pulse a few times more.  Then add an 1/2 cup of a good quality olive oil and an 1/2 cup of freshly grated Parmesan and blend until smooth, scraping down the contents at least once. Season to taste with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

It goes beautifully on top of your favourite pasta or spread on French bread.  Actually if you love its taste, it can go on just about anything--baked potatoes, a smear on hard-boiled eggs, as a dip for  crudités, etc.  Pesto can be prepared for the freezer by leaving out the cheese and adding it after defrosting and before serving.  Upon exposure to air and freezing, the bright green colour changes to an olive green but its taste remains vibrant.

Mildew has attacked tomatoes in many gardens and fields throughout France.  It is very contagious and before you know it you are staring at dry and lifeless plants.  Since I eschew all chemical treatments for my edibles, all I can do is to remove infected leaves when I see them.

One hot and windy day, Madame M and I were in our individual gardens at the same time picking off infected leaves from a total of eighty plants between the two gardens.  After a bout of huffing and puffing, we would rest an arm on a tomato stake, look across our garden to the other's and laugh at ourselves.  The small mountain of yellowed leaves were not put on the compost, but carefully bagged.  So far, I have harvested enough juicy beefsteaks to make tomato soup concentrate and other goodies.  Hopefully, the remaining green toms will mature into plump globes of irresistible flavour.

Note the yellowed, brown spotted leaf in the upper right corner

It is an absolute delight to have a plentiful supply of ripe, juicy tomatoes.  I consider it an honour to figure out what to do with them all.  The Calm One has a knack of incorporating our garden produce into our routine dishes.  He makes a mean top-of-the-stove macaroni and cheese with three different cheeses and three different pastas.  His embellishment during tomato season is to put the macaroni and cheese in an oven casserole, top it with thickly sliced tomatoes, add additional grated cheese on top and place it under the broiler for about five minutes until nicely browned and the tomatoes have become more like a sauce.  I added some basil to mine, but he didn't as he already had reached his daily quota for green things on his plate.

Making a concentrated soup base is a good way to preserve tomatoes, serving as a base for both cold and hot, late summer/fall soups like my creamy tomato with Edam and brown rice soup--look out for the recipe around autumn.  For cold soups, I add either some cream or crème fraîche and add appropriate garnishes.

Dice tomatoes and add garlic, onions, celery/lovage, carrots, black peppercorns, heaps of fresh basil, and a bouquet garni, barely covering the whole lot with water.  If you have some rind ends of Parmesan, toss those in too. Fish them out before serving; they can be cut into small pieces and are quite delicious to eat on the side.

That's lovage on the bottom left

Simmer about an hour--the veggies should be very soft to make sieving easy. A thorough sieving via a Foley Mill is all that is necessary to have a thick soup base which can then be frozen. 

Another way to use tomatoes is to blend them raw along with other tasty ingredients.  Since gazpacho has many recipes whose creators insist are the true version on the Web, I decided to add to the already huge collection.  I am attempted to call mine the omission/addition gazpacho recipe because it lacks all the ingredients I did not have on hand while using all the ones I had and thought would go well in this kind of cold soup.  I was very pleased with how it came out.

Instead of bread--some admonish those who use bread, but I recommend ignoring those people--I used some leftover buttered cous cous which imparted creaminess and a slightly nutty taste.  I didn't have green peppers, and besides I don't care for them much which is probably why there weren't any around.  Now red peppers are another matter; I adore those but my garden ones are not yet ready for harvesting.  Note to self:  get some shelf-loving powdered paprika.  I also think that raw onions when blended can be too overpowering so they were left out even though I have heaps of those from the garden.  Of course, gazpacho is all about tomatoes, so unless you can get wonderful, ripe, flavoursome tomatoes, it is probably not worth the effort.

Chop 1 kilogram of unpeeled ripe tomatoes, crush one fat clove of garlic, and peel and chop a medium cucumber.   A couple of slices of bread, soaked in water and squeezed out well can easily be substituted for an 1/3rd cup of left-over, cooked, buttered cous cous.  Measure out 50 ml of olive oil and 1 tablespoon of apple cider vinegar.   Fill up the blender with one third of the ingredients, blend till mushy, add another third, blend again, and then add the final third, blending this time several minutes until very smooth.

Sieve or not to sieve?  I consider both versions to be delicious, just different--the sieved one is undeniably more smooth and a bit more urbane while the not sieved one is somewhat boisterous with its more grainy and earthy texture.  If a food processor is used instead of a blender, sieving may be more compelling.  Dilute with a little water if too thick for your taste--I found the thickness to be as satisfying as a nice substantial porridge.

To chill or not to chill?  So many important questions when making such a simple soup!  If most of your ingredients came from the fridge, the soup will be cold enough to scoff down right away.  If not, then chill in the fridge for an hour or so.  Garnish with cucumber ribbons, minced flat leaf parsley, and finely chopped hard-boiled egg.  Serve with tortilla chips.

Bon appétit!

RELATED POSTS AND LINKS

Raw tomatoes stuffed with tuna served on a bed of cous cous
A superb collection of creative gazpacho recipes at Scoop.it!

How to Make Chilled Cucumber Soup...and raw stuffed tomatoes

It was the front garden which caught my eye when we were looking at our place for the first time.  Though it was very neglected, overgrown, and smothered with five-feet-high weeds, I could see its lovely structure and over-all potential and barely paid attention to The Calm One's concern that there was a commercial refrigeration truck depot behind the property.  This is France with its unique approach to zoning after all.  Rejuvenation for various shrubs and trees, especially the lavender hedges, is still on going but marked improvement can already be seen. I am mightily encouraged.

Lavender, Shasta daisies, purple plum tree, and Rose of Sharon bushes

Dayo loves to play hide and seek in the lavender hedge, sleep in the ample crotch of the Box Elder tree, and hang out on the balcony while checking out the street action.

Reminding me that summer is in full swing which will morph too soon into early autumn are grapes beginning to colour.  There are enough starlings in my quartier to form murmurations.  Though I keep the bird bath full, it seems a refreshing drink of grape juice is still very attractive. Now that Dayo is with us, this is the first season in three I think I may be able to harvest a nice amount of grapes for making grape jelly.  To be on the safe side when Dayo is napping which takes out a huge chunk from his time spent as a grape guardian, I have pinned horticultural fleece using clothespins over the vines to ensure the grapes can continue to soak in the sun and mature to full sugary goodness.  I  have left a few vines for the starlings.

The prunes d'ente will be ready for harvesting in a couple of weeks.

The flowers taking the spotlight now are white and pink Rose of Sharon bushes and Black-eyed Susan vine.

Latin name:  Hibiscus syriacus

Black-eyed Susan is a cheerful vine with canary-yellow flowers boasting deep brownish-violet throats.  Though not hardy here, it is easy to grow from seed indoors starting in February.

Latin name:  Thunbergia alata

The cucumber patch is going bonkers with about four to five medium cucumbers daily with a handful of baby ones.  I chose this variety because it can be harvested both for tiny cornichons for pickling and also for salad cucumbers.  It starts out with a rough texture and then smooths out as it grows.

Chicken broth often is used as a base for cold vegetable soups, but as home-grown veggies are full of fantastic flavour, I made a veggie alternative, keeping out of mind the awful salt water passed off as commercial vegetable broth.  Goodness, what delicious stuff!  Of course, it is only as good as the veggies, so please if you do not grow your own, barter with your neighbour who does or get some at a farmer's market.

Carrots, onions, and celery or lovage is a good base.  Lovage is a perennial stand-in for the annual celery.  Once common in the kitchen garden, it has an intense--celery with a touch of anise--flavour so a little goes a long way.  For my broth, I added to this base scrubbed potatoes with their skins, green peppers, carrot tops, and overgrown green beans along with parsley, black peppercorns, bay leaf, and thyme.  I forgot to add my own mushrooms from the kit in the sous sol and will definitely do the next time.  Carrot tops were a revelation as I thought they would be bitter but they were sweet and oh so carroty.  Put what you have gathered in the right sized pot and cover with water.  Bring to a simmer and cover.

Within approximately thirty minutes and after straining, you will have an excellent veggie broth, and thanks to the carrots, it even looks like chicken broth!  The broth can be poured into ice cube trays, frozen, separated, and put into freezer bags.

The tender potatoes, robustly flavoured by the other veggies, were reserved to make potato salad.

Sliced potatoes, chiffonade of basil, and minced onions dressed in Mayo diluted with vinegar

Both cucumber skins and seeds can add not only a disagreeable texture but also bitterness so I peel and seed them, using a peeler to do both tasks.  Apparently, cucumber flesh itself can be amazingly bitter, so test a few peeled, seeded slices to make sure that the finished soup will be edible. 

Put in a blender the following ingredients until very smooth, about three minutes:

• cucumbers, seeded, peeled, cubed, about 5 medium cucumbers, 4 cups
• vegetable broth, 1 1/2 cups
• garlic, one clove
• green onions or chives/small onion, chopped, about 1/2 cup
• lemon juice, freshly squeezed, 1 tablespoon

The green onions or chives tint the soup a nice light green.  Since it is easy to underestimate seasoning when a soup is served cold, I reserve doing that until it is well chilled. Pour into a suitable container and put in the fridge overnight or at least several hours.  Add 1/2 cup of  crème fraîche/sour cream, mix well.  Be aware the substitution of yogurt for the  crème fraîche may result in a less smooth texture as the lemon juice seems to curdle it.  If too thick for your tastes, dilute with some more vegetable broth.  Season with salt, freshly ground black pepper or red pepper flakes, add more lemon juice if preferred--common complaint with cold cucumber soup is that it lacks ooomph--and garnish with chives, sliced cucumbers, and shrimp.  A little lemon zest would be nice also. I like to serve this refreshing soup with French bread topped with shrimp salad.  It makes approximately four servings.

Ah, the tomatoes are turning red.  A favourite way of my using hefty beefsteak tomatoes is stuffing them with tuna salad and serving them on a bed of cous cous, with the whole garnished with chiffonade of basil, cucumber slices, capers, chopped garlic, and fleur de sel.  Though more expensive than regular salt, it does last a long time because it is not for cooking as its taste-boosting edge would be lost, but is reserved just for before serving.  I find if the best and most flavourful ingredients are used, portion control is much easier to implement.

In the bottom pot of a double boiler, barely cover the cous cous with boiling water.  Cover for about five minutes and let it absorb the water.  Using a fork, fluff it up with butter and season with salt.

Then transfer the cous cous to the steamer basket--filling the bottom pot with a couple of inches of water and steam it for about five minutes, occasionally fluffing it with a fork.

Wash and pat dry the tomatoes.  Carefully carve out the core with a knife and scoop out the insides with a small spoon, leaving enough wall to maintain shape.

Squeeze the scooped-out tomatoes over a bowl, then finely chop.  I freeze the juice to add when making tomato soup.

Mix tuna and mayo well, and then add chopped tomatoes and mix again, season with salt and freshly ground pepper if desired.

Stuff the tomatoes well--firming each spoonful before adding another, finishing with a mounding at the top--and place on the centre of serving plates.  Spoon cous cous around it, add sliced cucumbers, sprinkle with minced garlic, chiffonade of basil, capers, and fleur de sel.  If you want everything to be very cold, put in the fridge for about an hour.

Bon appétit!

Pruning Prune Plums

When first seeing the neglected state of various fruit trees in this forty-year-old garden, I was sure I could gradually restore them to robust production.  Two years later:  4 thriving, 5 languishing, 5 dead.

Wood pigeon resting on the Golden Delicious apple tree

The largest casualty was a thirty-foot cherry tree.   It was chopped down by a trio of rough-and-ready workers who entered our quartier last spring to work bomb it.  It was a case of my will against theirs:  Chop down the cherry tree, nothing else, yes, just the cherry tree.  That's right,  see the cherry tree over there, the big, dead tree, chop it down, no, don't prune the pear tree, it's the wrong season, chop down the cherry tree.  No, I don't want the shed painted, chop down the cherry tree.

On their bill, under the reason why the work was done was this quaint phrase: a la fin de vie (at the end of its life).  I felt comforted the fact it had a life was recognised. 

Pile of cherry tree limbs obscuring the thick, forked trunk

Pruning fruit trees and bushes assures a good harvest.  Chez nous, there are figs, apples, pears, peaches, plums, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries, red/black currants, and grape vines.

Avocado filled with grape jelly (last jar!) made from previous season's grape harvest

Prunier d'ente is a plum tree bearing egg-shaped, deep-purple plums.   The one in our front garden, other than for an annual bout with mites which I successfully hose off each spring, is flourishing.  Its ample harvest provides enough jam lasting most of the year, along with plum leather which disappears within a few weeks because it so delicious we just can't stop until it is all gone.  However, this variety of plum is grown mainly for making prunes, that is, pruneaux (dried plums), as prune means fresh plum in French.  Perhaps this season, I will try my hand at drying some.

Prunier d'ente and lavender in front garden

An essential element of pruning is apical dominance.  I use the analogy of an leader training her replacement.  The bud forming the branch tip is the strongest.  However, it is necessary at times to reduce a branch's length, so if an apical bud is cut off, make sure that the cut reaches just above an lateral bud that is going in the right direction, usually outfacing.  This lateral bud will then develop into a branch with an apical bud, keeping the general growth robust, in other words, in the hands of good leadership.

Apical dominance guides an crucial aspect of pruning, dropped crotches.  I love that phrase and will go around the week or so I do all the pruning saying dropped crotches to anyone who will listen.  A tree's height and width is lessened using this technique.  While envisioning giant wish bones, I remove the longer of the two branches down to the wish bone's angled joint, leaving the branch collar (slightly swollen area where a branch joins another) intact as it contains wound-healing chemicals.  Note that the shorter branch remaining retains its apical bud. 

Besides reduction of width and height, the inner space of the tree needs to be opened to sunshine, and any limb rubbing against another is removed along with dead/diseased/injured wood.  Most pruning jobs are done in late winter/early spring when the sap has not yet risen and the bareness allows for thorough inspection of the tree's structure. However, dead wood can be removed any time.  Since spring-flowering bushes bloom on the previous season's growth,  they usually need to be pruned following flowering so as not to eliminate this season's flowers.

Besides grasping that pruning is not shearing, using the proper tools safely is also important.
  

Retractable straight saw, curved saw, secateurs, lopers, leather gloves

There are extensible versions of the basic pruning tools, so climbing onto a ladder or up a tree usually is not necessary.  The goal for small home orchards is to keep the tree at the right height allowing adequate pruning and harvesting with ease.  Nowadays, there also is a great selection of dwarf and semi-dwarf fruit trees.  If interested in more information regarding setting up and caring for home orchards check out Dave Wilson Nursery's YouTube channel.

I am off to prune the pear tree, because those work bombers promised to come back this spring to tame its unruly top with a chain saw.  They obviously know nothing about dropped crotches.