Plum Sauce

I loved that line from the English Patient  - "It is a very plum, plum".  

We picked these beauties up from our local farmer's market on the weekend.  Organically grown and plucked from trees not 15 minutes from our home.  We gorged ourselves on them at the market, on the way home, when we got home... 

After eating our fill the remainder were earmarked for plum sauce.  I like to make a batch each year and always use the same recipe.  It is from my Mother's friend.  Actually it is her Mother's recipe.  

(Don't worry - Our little girl isn't sticking her fingers into boiling hot sauce in the pic above.  She is licking the sugar off the plums before I turned the element on!)

The recipe is really simple - sugar, vinegar and some spices which you wrap up in a little cloth bundle.  It boils for a few hours until it goes a lovely rich, dark colour and fills the kitchen with that sharp vinegar smell.  Some people aren't keen on it, but I love it.

Bottles of plum sauce lined up in the pantry surely makes me smile.  Although I always try to make the final bottle last until plum season the following year, the sauce is just so good on so many things that we always seem to run out.

I am looking forward to the day when making sauce with plums from our own garden becomes a reality - there is something pretty special about having a hand in the whole process.  Seeing as our plum tree which we planted last year had only five plums on it this season, it could be a while!

Until then, this is as good as it gets.  Yum.

xx