Front Yard Sorbet

For the past two years, I've enjoyed the deep red foliage and gorgeous white-pink blossoms of the plum tree in our front yard while merely stepping over the sticky stain blobs of the tiny plums it drops on the sidewalk. Never having an edible fruit tree before, I think we subconsciously assumed the plums were sour, toxic, or bad in some way. But this summer, since we've been in the rhythm of checking our garden for harvest-ready peas and tomatoes each day, I finally looked at the plum tree and really SAW the plums before they made it to the sidewalk and it dawned on me that we had no reason to believe the fruits were bad and had never even tested them.

I plucked just one off a branch, ate it, and waited around for a few hours ready to dial 911 if I started feeling poisoned or something. It was really juicy and sweet and I didn't die, so I commenced with Googling and unofficially identified that we are the owners of a "cherry plum" tree. Several websites dismissed these trees warning that cherry plums are not worth harvesting as they aren't much bigger than a cherry and their fruit clings to the pits. But I couldn't pass up the chance to pick and eat fruit with Turtle in our very own yard!

We got out the 6 foot ladder and took turns climbing up to reach the plums that we could. Unfortunately, many of them were still beyond my reach, so I would need some serious equipment if I ever really wanted to harvest them all. And many of them were already half eaten or fermented, bursting apart as we touched them. But eventually we had 20 or so good ones that we kept.

Since they were all pretty ripe and wouldn't last long and we didn't want to eat 20 plums that day, I decided we should make something out of them. Sorbet seemed summery and easy enough, so we looked at a few online recipes, rinsed the plums, and started to de-pit them.

Perhaps there exists some awesome technique or tool used for pitting cherry plums neatly. If so, please let me know. I just kind of ended up hacking them open with knives and then they'd nearly explode into a pulpy mess all over the cutting board. There was a lot of skin and juice all over the place and not much "meat" and it was really hard to get the meat off the pit. After trying a few different things, the easiest was to just hold a plum over a bowl and use my fingernails to kind of pull the pit out and just drop whatever was left behind into the bowl as juice dribbled down my arms. Very messy business and I was starting to understand the websites that said cherry plums aren't worth putting your energy into!

Here you can see what pitting 20 cherry plums gave us- less than a cup of juice and skins. I can't imagine how much work and mess it would have been to try to make a true quantity of sorbet.
Then we remembered that we had some leftover watermelon in the fridge, so we chopped that up and added it to bulk up our mixture. That went into a blender and then was strained to get the skins and seeds out. After straining, you can see that we only ended up with a little over a cup of stuff.

Meanwhile, I prepared a 1:1 sugar to water syrup on the stove. 1 cup sugar dissolved into 1 cup water allowed to boil for 30 seconds together. We added that directly to the fruit mixture. So, it ended up being 1 cup syrup to 1 cup fruit. Then a squirt of lemon juice, stirred it up, and put it in a container in the freezer. I have never made sorbet before. I have no idea if we needed the lemon juice, but most sorbet recipes had it. I have no idea if my ratio of syrup to fruit was right, because all of the recipes dealt with much larger quantities of fruit, used different ratios than each other, or said add syrup to taste. I had no idea if mixing watermelon and plum was a good idea and if our sorbet would taste any good at all, but we had fun making it, so I was happy with the experience.

The next day, we took out our nearly frozen solid chunk of sorbet and broke it up with a fork to make it fluffy, then put it back in the freezer for a couple hours. It looked gorgeous when we took it out after dinner:

Now, I'm no gourmet. It probably had too many ice crystals and maybe the sugar ratio wasn't quite right and so on and so forth. But it was really really yummy. Seriously yummy! Everyone loved it!

It was a lot of work and mess for a tiny bit of dessert, but it was even sweeter because we had used the fruits from our own tree and made it ourselves!

How My Garden Made Me Sick

Yesterday, I learned what bolting is.

Bolting: What my stomach contents wanted to do all afternoon and last night after eating a big salad for lunch made from the romaine I've been growing the backyard this summer.

We planted 4 each of romaine and red leaf lettuce from seedlings this spring for the first time and they both did beautifully, continuously producing scrumptuously crisp and tasty leaves for us to eat for the past month or so. Having no real experience with lettuce, I wasn't sure if I should cut a whole head and bring it in to the kitchen- would that kill the plant, would it resprout? So, I would just keep tearing only the leaves I needed for the day off the bottom of the head in the hopes that the center would continue producing. That plan seemed to work and I had fresh lettuce for sandwiches and salad every day for a long time. I signed up for the green salad at all the potlucks and we couldn't even begin to consume all of the lettuce we were producing with our little family of 3, one of whom won't eat lettuce.



Then a couple weeks ago I noticed that the romaine was suddenly growing tall instead of just bushy. It shot up a long stem between each set of leaves and kept stretching out its height. I had no idea what that meant but figured it signaled that the lettuce was moving on to some new phase of life and maybe wouldn't produce much longer. But I kept eating it and it tasted fine. Then the red leaf shot up flowers and when I mentioned it to friends they said "yeah, you can't let the lettuce go to seed". But no one could actually tell me why when I asked. So, I chopped off the flower stalk in the hopes that I could force the lettuce to keep producing leaves and kept eating it.

Yesterday I was thinking about how the lettuce plants were probably ready to reproduce and would soon stop making new leaves and would die, so I should enjoy them while I can, so I made this big salad for lunch from the romaine, which looked closer to death than the red leaf. AFTER I enjoyed my salad, I decided to finally look this up and try to understand more about growing lettuce. It was only after some searching and many more unexplained "you shouldn't let the lettuce go to seed" statements, that I finally found out what was going on.

It turns out that my lettuce has been bolting- that's the name for when it shoots up and puts out flowers to make seed. It's like it's trying to "leave" your garden. And that lettuce will naturally bolt after some time and you can't stop or reverse it, maybe just slow it down a little by cutting off its flowers like I did. And, more importantly, that as it bolts, it will start producing bitter compounds in the leaves and becomes inedible. And that sometimes it will bolt early if it's under stress- if it becomes too hot, too dry, too crowded. And that if you let it go to seed, you'll end up with seeds that you wouldn't want to plant because they have a tendency to bolt early or you'll end up with seeds scattered in your soil that will become lettuce weeds in other areas of your garden plot. And you shouldn't put the seeds in your compost for the same reason. And that people spend a lot of energy cultivating and taking care of strains of lettuce that last as long as possible before bolting and those are the best seeds to buy.

Well, it was nice to learn about how to garden lettuce after I had already gardened it. And really good to know about the bitter compounds after I had that big salad because then when an hour or so later I started feeling nauseated and that went on all day and all night, at least I knew why! I'm pretty sure I toxified myself slightly yesterday with my homegrown bolted romaine lettuce. But that's what I call hands-on learning!

We unceremoniously pulled all the lettuce up last night and plopped it in the compost pile. Moving on to other garden adventures...

Enjoying Shopping With A Toddler. Really.

As the rice paper wrapper melts in my mouth, I am reliving childhood. The sensations- the texture, the taste, just the look of the box awaken long quiet neural circuits. Botan Rice Candy.

The coolest part is that they are wrapped in rice paper, so you just pop them in your mouth and wait for that to melt before you eat the candy. I remember only getting these candies occasionally as a kid, that I thought they were really special. I feel like that's because my grandparents would bring them to Texas from LA or San Francisco. They certainly weren't stocked at the local Stop 'n Go, where we rode our bikes to get candy cigarettes and talk to teen clerk, Kermit (whom I always associated with the muppet). As Texans 30 years ago, we'd had our share of Chicle, but most things Asian were a novelty.

We picked up the rice candy today at Daiso, a Japanese everything store that's a couple of steps up from a 99 cents store, but cheaper and more fun to look around in than Target. Having Turtle home sick for the day, we browsed around just to entertain ourselves. He played with cutesy keychains, ceramic figurines, and wooden trains while I looked at garden supplies, stationery, and arts & crafts stuff. Then we each picked out a treat. I got the rice candy and he got Yan Yan.

Which took effort for me to cheerfully and without comment buy him. It is biscuit-like stick things that you dip in liquid vanilla "cream" which is actually, uh, ? I don't even want to read the fine print. The label does reassuringly say, though, that it "does not contain pig fat". I'm sure people all over the world enjoy Yan Yan all the time. It's just that I didn't even let him have so much as a single M&M until a few months ago and only then because they were already mixed into the trail mix.

We also scored some cat deterrents for the garden we prepped this morning. A couple of weeks ago we started some seeds in peat pots indoors and they are ready for transplanting. This morning we turned the soil in a small portion of the two as of yet unused by us raised beds in my backyard. But that was after we had to scoop out all the cat poop that had accumulated from neighborhood cats helping themselves to our giant litter boxes. We added compost, watered, and then set off on our errands.

We were happy to discover these plastic sheets of spikes that you cover your soil with and the plants can grow right through them. They had Japanese labels that were awkwardly translated to "Don't Cat!" Turtle expressed mixed feelings: "Mom, but then the cats will be hurt" but also "Yeah! Then those cats will not crap in OUR garden!" Which qualified as his first use of the word crap. Gotta note that in the baby book.

After Daiso, we wandered over to the German Bakery. Turtle selected a frosted shark shaped cookie and I enjoyed a slice of coffee cake so brimming with poppy seeds that I'm glad teachers don't get drug tested.

There's so many days when I have to squeeze in a trip to the store after an already long day to pick up something necessary and Turtle is whining and dragging his feet, arguing with me in the store, running away from me, or making us cross the store over and over for false alarm potty trips. Or days when you have multiple errands and every buckle and unbuckle of the carseat feels so tedious and you know everything it taking you three times as long as it would if you could just do it alone.

But today was really nice. We accomplished several necessary errands, he cheerfully walked along beside me, waited in line with me, browsed on his own without knocking things over and making a mess, let me take my sweet time looking at stuff by keeping himself occupied with something else down the aisle, and we talked and laughed together and pointed out funny or cute things to each other. Then we had ourselves a nice time at the bakery and Japanese treats to look forward to for later. It was the closest thing I've had to spending the morning shopping with a girlfriend in a long time. I'll take what I can get these days...

I'm so excited about our "Don't Cat!".