Wiola and Marcin brought me 2 bags of fruit the other day from Wiola’s boss’s orchard. Lots of pink, juicy apples and some delicious plums, less than 3 kg of those.  It took me 2 days to decide to try and make  a plum preserve, similar to what my Mum’s been making for years.  Jars have been ordered, Mum has been consulted and yesterday I made a start.  Chopped and deprived of stones, they went into the pan with a splash of water.

The smell the plums gave out while cooking was fantastic. I fried them gently for about 4-5 hours yesterday, stirring often to avoid any burning, then restarted the process this morning, another 4 hours, till massively reduced, thick, darkened and making hot lava sounds. Towards the end of the cooking I sweetened it to taste. Kept on adding and kept on tasting, careful, as did not want to end up with too sweet preserve or worse- a sour one that I’d not enjoy eating.

And so, 2 hours after the postie delivered the jars, this is what I had on the island;

The jars were filled with 3 cm space from the top while preserve was hot, turned upside down and left to cool in this position. 4 jars of preserve from nearly 3 kg of plums. A very good start though, I’d say!

This year we have super hot summer, nearly 2 months of heat. It’s also the first year of my growing tomatoes, which struggle in the small greenhouse in 45 degrees plus.  As I’m a beginner, notes are being taken for things to be improved next year. First of all, much bigger pots will be purchased. Each one of my toms is standing in a 5 litre pot and needs to be watered up to twice a day. Not ideal, there will be bigger pots next year. And Florek is working on a computer controlled( obviously!:-/) watering system, so that we woudn’t have to ask people to water them, when we’re on holidays, like Jon did in June.

My dad in law argued a couple of weeks ago, what is the point of growing the tomatoes, if there’s plenty of them in a supermarket. Well, an hour ago I’ve brought 2 good handfuls of cherry tomatoes from greenhouse; they have super hard skins, but underneath….candy. Sweet, warm from the sun, bursting in the mouth goodness.

We eat lots of them served the simple way we tried in Italy- roughly chopped, sprinkled with chopped shallot-generously, seasoned with salt and pepper and drowned with good Italian olive oil. Once eaten, what’s left on the plate is a pool of tomato juice and olive oil, sponged off with crusty bread- food heaven. Next year- onwards with homegrown tomatoes and other veggies. 🙂