Plum butter in a crock pot

I got a call a few weeks ago from a neighbor. It seems her yellow plum tree was overflowing with plums, and did I want some?

You bet! Younger Daughter and I grabbed baskets and off we went. The plums were abundant and beautiful. Not huge, but very sweet.

I wanted to make plum butter, so after putting aside some of the best for fresh eating, I pitted the rest.

Then I set up the food strainer...

...and started running the fruit through. Took no time at all. The pulp was a lovely golden-yellow.

Don said the waste looked like what comes out of a horse's backside. Vulgar, yes, but I couldn't argue with the accuracy of the description.

The chickens thought the scraps were fabulous.

I put all the pulp into the crock pot (some people call them slow cookers since Crock Pot is a brand name).

I put the setting on "low" and let it sit overnight.

Then came the cleanup. Of course.

I had never made a fruit butter in a crock pot before, but lots of online sources said it's so easy. And they were right. An occasional stirring is all it took.

Before I went to bed, I cracked the lid open for the night to let the steam escape and allow the plum pulp to reduce. The color changed from golden-yellow to a rich purple.

The next morning the butter was thickened, but not quite as much as I wanted, so I let it continue to simmer throughout the day. Then I made my fatal mistake.

Don and I had a rare "date night" and went to the county fair. He suggested I remove the butter from the heat before we left, but I said, "Nah, it'll be fine."

We had a splendid time at the fair...

...where we saw every conceivable foodstuff "deep fried."

Anyway, suffice it to say by the time we got home, the plum butter was burned beyond redemption. Oops.

We didn't get back to the neighbor's plum tree until last Wednesday, by which time 95% of the plums had already been picked, given away, dropped to the ground and squished, or attacked by yellow jackets. We collected the least-mushy fruit we could find. The nice thing about making fruit butter is you can use past-its-prime fruit.

Once more I went through the process of pitting the fruit and running it through the food strainer, then putting the pulp in the crock pot.

Once again I let it simmer overnight, leaving the lid cracked open so steam could release. I let it simmer through the late morning, at which time it seemed thick enough.

It was fairly sweet, but I went ahead and added a quarter-cup of honey and a squirt of vanilla.

Then I filled half-pint jars with the hot butter.

Scalding the lids.

Fruit butter needs to be processed in sterilized jars for ten minutes (jars need to be sterilized whenever anything processes for ten minutes). Since I hate sterilizing jars, I chose to process the butter for 20 minutes to make up for the lack of sterilization.

Fruit butters are a spiffy way to use up mushy fruit and convert it into something delicious rather than consigning it to the compost pile. And using a crock pot means you don't have to babysit the stuff for the looooong time it takes to cook down.

Just don't go to the fair in the meantime.

Straining honey and buzzing bees

When we got our hives set up a couple weeks ago, we were tasked with gleaning the honey from last year's bees.

Our beekeeping mentor, Mike, has an extractor and said he would be happy to do it for us for a modest fee. All we had to do was bring him the frames.

To do this, I took a plastic tub that used to contain potting soil...

...and gave it a good scrub.

The frames fit neatly inside.

Most of them, that is.

Fascinating stuff, honeycomb.

The total weight of the frames, comb, honey, and crate came to 53 lbs.

We brought the crate to Mike when we picked up our bees. A week later, he called to say the extracted honey was ready.

I don't know what I expected, but it sure wasn't this mess:

It was a glutinous mix of honey and wax, and frankly looked revolting. Ewwww.

It needed to be filtered. Duh.

After consulting some YouTube videos, we set up a crude initial filtering system with double colanders.

This got us, almost literally, nowhere over the next 24 hours.

Clearly we were doing something wrong. A bit more online consultation, and we realized we needed to heat the honey. Again I say, duh. (Can you tell we're new at this?)

So I set up two large pots, nested, to make a double boiler, and gently heated the honey. I was careful not to get it too hot since I didn't want the wax to melt. I just needed the honey to soften.

All the difference in the world. I did an initial crude straining through a mesh colander.

It filtered through very readily and took mere minutes.

Then I put the rough-filtered honey back in the pot to warm...

...and set up a finer filter using cloth.

Once again, it took mere minutes to go through the entire batch of honey in this manner.

I made sure to capture every drop!

Then came the fun task of decanting the filtered honey into quart jars, which would allow us to more accurately measure how much we got.

It's just so durned pretty, isn't it?

Final tally: two gallons.

Afterward, I took the messy bucket and rough colander...

...and set it next to the hive for the bees to clean up.

However we had a spate of cold, windy, nasty, rainy weather, and they never got around to it. In fact, there was so little activity around the hives that we wondered if the bees were okay. After several days, we smoked and opened the hives to top off the feeders, and saw the bees were fine, just sluggish with the cold.

The ugly weather took several days to run its course. On the afternoon of the first warmer day, Don came into the house and said, "There are bees all over the rose bush." I grabbed the camera and hurried to see. Sure enough, the large wild rose bush growing next to the chicken coop was thick with bees. What a glorious sight!