Serendipitous Plum Jam

Serendipity and blogging is a wonderful thing. A chance comment can lead to a superb plum jam. Another blogger can tidy up their blog and give some direction on where to make changes and suddenly I am away on my blog housekeeping again.

Firstly the jam. I love comments and often discover wonderful new blogs through comments. Admittedly I sometimes don’t have time to follow up new bloggers but I do so as much as I can. A few weeks ago, I had a lovely comment from Kitchen Butterfly. I visited her blog and found it a joy to explore. I loved her post on ‘if Rudyard Kipling was a foodie’ and then I found her Plum post. As it happened, I had over ripe plums sitting in my kitchen as I read all her wonderful ideas for what to do with plums. I decided to try her simple plum jam recipe.

Last year I tried a peach and pineapple jam. It never set and tasted far too sweet. I don’t eat jam really regularly and decided I should stick to chutneys. In fact, I only finished up the jam in January, a year after I made it. But I do have a great love of the dark depths of a jar of plum jam.

This jam was so quick easy and delicious that it has made me reconsider making jam. Everything went right. There wasn’t too much scum so I didn’t bother scooping it out. The jam wrinkled on the saucer so nicely as soon as I tried it. It even coped when Sylvia kept me from checking it and I had to just tell E to turn off the gas flame until I could look at the consistency. And when I tipped it into the jars, I wished for a funnel that folded up into a drawer. When I searched for one, lo and behold I found one. I reduced the sugar a little and that worked fine too in keeping it from being too sweet.

If only every recipe worked so well. And it turned inedible plums into a gorgeous deep purple jam. It is so nice to have home made jam about the house. We are halfway through the second jar already. It was also helpful to be able to read my previous post about jam for tips (mainly on what not to do).

When the blogosphere delivers it is a beautiful thing. Not only did it help me with my jam but yesterday I saw that Nupur had tidied up her blog. She mentioned that she had been using the new Blogger Edit Pages function. I had seen it but not understood what it meant until I saw Nupur’s great new menu under her header. I am easily distracted with such diversions. Immediately I looked up this function and have started to rearrange my key information pages.

This will be an ongoing project, alongside so many others, but I think that already it is quite helpful to have links up there. I am going to move my blogroll there. I don’t update it as much as I should so this is an opportunity to do so. But it makes me sad to see links to bloggers who are no longer updating their blog. I worry they might return and so I don’t want to delete their link but I also worry that the list gets too long. So it will take me a while.

I have also started a new page on kudos as a way to acknowledge some of the lovely awards other bloggers have given me. Which reminds me that I still intend to do a post on the Happy 101 Award that Tanna and Katie have given me.

Let me know if you have any feedback on the new pages that are going up under my header. I think it is a more prominent place but it means archiving my indexes etc and opening up new pages that do not allow for comments. As I said at the start of this post, I love comments and can get a lot of connections and information from them as well as some warm and fuzzy feelings. So keep them coming and I look forward to more serendipity.

Plum Jam
Adapted from the Australian Women’s Weekly via Kitchen Butterfly
Makes 2 small jars

• 8 dark plums (Butterfly says 9 or about 1kg)
• 1½ cups water
• juice of ½ a lemon or about 2 tbsp
• about 1½ cups caster sugar

Roughly chop plums and discard stones. Put plums and water in a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Reduce heat, cover pan and simmer for about 45 minutes. (NB my plums were very soft so if yours are less ripe you may need an hour like Butterfly.)

Add lemon juice and sugar, stirring over gentle heat without boiling, till the sugar dissolves. Butterfly suggests you start sterilising jars now. (I just boiled some water, poured it on the jars and then briefly let them dry on a rack.)

Boil uncovered, stirring occasionally for about 15-20 minutes or until jam jells when tested! (I did what Nigella suggests and put it in the freezer for 5 minutes, took it out and pushed my finger through it and it wrinkled so I took it off the heat.)

Spoon hot jam into hot jars. Seal, cool and label. Enjoy!

On the stereo:
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