Plum update

I really do make quilts, I promise. In fact, my striped quilt is almost done--I just haven't been taken photographs of the work in progress. But as you can see from yesterday's post, I did cut off the excess edges, and I'm now about half-way through hand-finishing the binding. I'll have photos of the finished quilt before too long.

In the meantime, plum mania continues. But the end is approaching: we've picked nearly 400 plums, and there are just a few dozen left on the tree. Here's what a refrigerator half-full of plums looks like:

I told myself I wasn't going to buy an ice cream machine, but friends of ours, without even knowing of my granita experiments, gave me a book of ice cream, sorbet, and granita recipes for my birthday last week. It was fate: how could I not buy an ice cream maker? Yesterday evening was the trial run, and we had a delicious plum ginger vodka sorbet (same recipe as the granita discussed on August 22, but with ginger-infused simple syrup). I was also reduced to making plum fruit spread (just plums and sugar, and a lot of boiling), and it wasn't bad, but not as good as the sorbet. I'm going to puree a good portion of the remaining plums and store the puree in the freezer, so that we'll be able to enjoy sorbet all winter!