Plums, plums, plums! What's in your CSA?

[sbrinton]

At our CSA this week, we picked up about 5 pints of plums. Any idea what to do with them?

We like to eat them, but we probably cannot eat them quickly enough as they are very ripe. We made a plum tarte tatin last week that was incredible, but I need another idea! Has anyone made a plum freezer jam of some sort?

We also have loads of other produce (carrots, onions, garlic, bok choy, broccoli, lettuce, tomato, green beans, summer squash), if you have any other ideas.

[Aubergine68]

We don't have CSAs here, mores the pity. However, the last time I had a surplus of plums I chopped them, froze them in a ziplock bag, and added handfuls to oatmeal or to smoothies. It isn't the first fruit you think of for these uses, but it was yummy.

We make a lot of smoothies in the summer, either plain fruit or with yogurt/milk and freeze the excess as popsicles for the kids.

[cristeen]

Plums make beautiful jam. If they're still firm-fleshed, you can cut them in half, pit them and freeze them individually. If they're ripe to the point of being bags of liquid, then jam is about the only thing for it.

[BetsyS]

A few years back, I made some wonderful plum sauce (out of the ball blue book) that we loved.

[Alyantavid]

You can also freeze them whole. We have (or had until this year) tons of plums every summer. I freeze them so we can eat them all winter too.

[sbrinton]

Plum jam it is. I think I'm going to add a little lemon juice and zest. We'll see how it turns out...

I'm going to make strawberry jam too. Good activity for a cloudy, cool summer morning.

[laohaire]

Wow, you're lucky. Our CSA seems a lot more stingy. I'd hoped to get excess of certain things, but I never did. I would love to get 5 pints of anything! lol.

[artemis33]

I made and canned plum butter a couple years ago when I was given a huge bag of italian plums. It was so good!

We recently discovered an italian plum tree on our property here (it is so badly in need of a pruning we didn't recognize what it was until it started fruiting!) so I am looking forward to making some again when they ripen. I may half them and dry some too.

[~pi]

Yum.

Looking at your list, I would sauté the bok choy in a little olive oil with onion and garlic, then toss with small wedges of plums (I might salt them a tiny bit first and set them aside in a colander to reduce the liquid) and a little balsamic vinegar. (This is an awesome, flexible side dish -- we do variations on this regularly with our CSA greens and DS (3) gobbles it up.)

Other ideas:

- Sliced plums make a wonderful topping for waffles. I got married right around this time of year and we were swimming in peaches and plums, so that's what we did for our wedding breakfast. (You could also try them on pancakes or French toast.)

- I second the recommendation for frozen plums in smoothies.

- Breakfast: plain yogourt topped with chopped plums and a mix of nuts and seeds.

- If you eat meat, plums make a good base to accompany different kinds of meat, e.g. here with chicken, here with pork.

- Fancy drinks.

- If you have a food dehydrator (or patience and time to do it in the oven) you could make your own prunes.

[Magelet]

Originally Posted by cristeen

Plums make beautiful jam. If they're still firm-fleshed, you can cut them in half, pit them and freeze them individually. If they're ripe to the point of being bags of liquid, then jam is about the only thing for it.

I made a delicious fruit crisp out of plums borderline bags of liquid (some were some weren't quite). obviously, jam is better long term storage, but it was amazing for the here and now.