I thought I’d continue in the same vein as my last post and bring you yet another delicious recipe with which to use your lovely juicy plums. This will be the last of the plum themed posts for now though, as although we had a very large amount of plums we only actually made muffins and chutney – 11 jars of the stuff. I think the next summer fruit recipe I’ll tackle will be Blackberry jam, but I need to find time to go out and pick them first.
Alright, alright, these aren’t wild plums, but they were picked out in the open as I mentioned in my last post, from plum trees hanging over the walls of other people’s gardens. At the weekend my girlfriend and I saw two such trees, one just around the corner from her house and another on a walk we went on which took us past Chequers – a residence of the Prime Minister. From two small branches of each tree we managed to alight more than 4 kilograms of plums, this seems quite a lot to pick from someone else’s tree, but they were already slightly over-ripe and there was no sign of them getting picked. The fact that they were slightly over-ripe made them even more alluring, especially for chutney making.
I am back from my sojourn at the house of my girlfriend laden with frugal recipes cheap enough to make one’s mind boggle. Seriously, this is the only place where describing something as ‘cheap’ would go down well, and I like that. I really have been a busy-bee for the past few days – I’ve been walking, cycling, cooking and snaffling free plums from trees overhanging their owner’s garden walls. As a result you can expect recipes for plum chutney and plum muffins to appear over the coming days – they are seriously good.
Recently I’ve had relatively little time to dedicate to blogging or cooking – I’ve been working and writing my CV. In fact all I’ve managed to prepare in the past couple of days has been an extremely simple yet fantastically tasty egg and rocket salad. I think simple food is sometimes the best – meals which really show off individual flavours well. The important thing to remember is that you want to showcase the taste of every individual ingredient, so you don’t want to use a flavour which is going to overpower the others. So when making this salad it’s probably best only to use a small squeeze of lemon juice because otherwise you’ll find that it’ll dominate the dish rather than improve it. From a cooking perspective make sure the poached egg is runny inside as it forms an integral part of the salad dressing.