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.

Canning blueberries

This summer I picked 18.5 lbs of blueberries from our bushes.

As they came ripe, I picked and froze them until the harvest was complete. Now it was time to haul all the bags out of the freezer and can them.

I wasn't sure how many pints 18.5 lbs of blueberries would fill, so I just started filling jars.

I also made a medium syrup.

Blueberries are some of the few fruits where a cold pack is recommended over a hot pack. I did not, however, blanch them.

I kept filling jars and kept filling jars until I ended up with 31 pints.

Then I filled the jars with syrup.

As I wiped the rims with a damp cloth...

...I found one jar with a nick, so I had to pour it into an unchipped jar.

Getting the lids ready.

Between my two largest pots, I could fit 17 pints at a time.

Blueberries (in pints) only need to process for 15 minutes at a rolling boil, so hammering through two sets didn't take long.

Even after a quarter-century of canning, I still find filled jars just -- beautiful.

Are we in for a hard winter?

Here in the Idaho panhandle, fall has indisputably arrived.

The sad remains of summer's oceanspray blooms dot the roadside.

Things are going to seed as fast as possible, while there's still time.

When we first moved up here from southwest Oregon in 2003, we had no way of knowing how severe the winters were. Since we live a mile and a half off-road, we decided every fall we would prepare as if we would be snowed in for three months. A touch extreme, perhaps, but as I said we had no way of knowing what to expect.

As it turns out, the first several winters were fairly mild. But then -- it hit. Two winters in a row were extraordinarily hard -- lots of snow and wind, lots of drifts. At one point our 300-foot driveway was impassible for eight weeks (we had our car parked at the end of it) and we had to transport kids and bundles back and forth on a sled. We practically lived on snowshoes while tending the livestock.

Since then the winters haven't been overly bad ... but there's always a chance the upcoming one will be a humdinger.

For eons, people have tried to anticipate the severity of winters. Folklore is rife with everything from the thickness of caterpillar fur to how many acorns an oak produces. Around here, we've heard predictions based on the thickness of deer or bear fat, size of the rose hips, abundance of snowberries, or other indicators. Yet so far I haven't been able to draw a correlation.

So what kind of signs are we seeing right now?

Well, the rose hips are ripening. Some are big...

...and some are regular-sized.

The snowberries are abundant, but nothing out of the ordinary.

The elderberries are coming ripe, but again there's nothing unusual about that.

I'm not sure what these little berries are, but they're pretty.

The one notable thing everyone is noticing are the sheer number of cones in all the fir trees. No one can recall seeing so many cones.

Everywhere we go, trees are absolutely loaded with them. Every. Single. Tree.

Some people are reporting broken branches and treetops, from the sheer weight.

The pines dropped their cones a month ago.

Whether this abundance of cones is any indication of an upcoming hard winter is anyone's guess.

A friend sent me this article from the Coeur d'Alene Press entitled "A new La Nina may bring us a snowy winter," in which it states: "The U.S. Climate Prediction Center gives a 75 percent chance that La Nina will come to life by the end of the year or even sooner. But, they don’t believe this new La Nina will be as strong as the one back in 2007 and 2008 when record snows hit our region."

If anyone knows of a proven indicator for what predicts a hard winter, I'd be interested in hearing it.

Meanwhile, we'll prepare for a hard winter. If it doesn't happen, we haven't lost anything.