I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Tag: making plum jelly

  • visions of sugar plums dancing in my head

    visions of sugar plums dancing in my head


    I know I posted this piece earlier in the year,

    but the story belongs in my holiday musings.

    Enjoy.

    I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills – oops, no that wasn’t me; that was Meryl Streep saying the first line from one of my favorite movies Out of Africa.

    I meant to say once upon a time I had a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our back yard on Worsham Street in Montgomery. The first year we were there that plum tree rained plums like pecans off a pecan tree in San Saba, the pecan capital of Texas. For reinforcements to help with the harvest, I first asked my next-door neighbor Jon who brought a ladder to pick the ones higher than I could reach on a tree that was twenty feet tall. He also was the first to suggest we should make plum jelly, an idea I rejected as ludicrous because I didn’t cook anything anymore. Enter my cousin James Paul, my mother’s brother’s son, who lived nearby and volunteered to help make plum jelly because he had my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Hm. He had a secret family recipe for plum jelly so maybe this was a sign I couldn’t ignore.

    Okay, what’s next, I repeated to James who stood beside me in the kitchen but appeared lost in a trance for what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time. His eyes were closed so long I began to wonder if he’d drifted off to sleep. James, what’s next, I said louder with more than a bit of impatience.

    Well Cuz, I think we need to put a bunch of these plums in some water and boil them for a while. That’s what we maybe need to do first, he finally said.

    What? I asked. You think we maybe need to start by boiling some plums in water for a while? What kind of recipe is that?

    Yeah, I seem to be having a little problem remembering the exact order Mother did things in, he replied. It’s been more than fifty years ago since I was a kid watching her, you know. I figured it would all come back to me, and I think it probably will. Besides, I thought you’d be more help. He stared at me – I stared back.

    Then the lunacy of what we were doing hit us both, and we started laughing together. We were having a good time. It was fun to try to re-create a simpler period in our lives when our people made some of the food we ate in our home kitchens, to reconnect to the lost sense of that family we’d had in those earlier days since we basically were apart our entire adult lives except for an occasional Christmas when our paths crossed in random moments under one roof. We shared the same family roots that gave us joy in our early childhood days, the family that gave us our hopes and dreams for the future. For James and me on a Sunday afternoon in my Worsham Street kitchen in the third act of our lives making plum jelly was an act of faith.

    But what we needed at the moment was a recipe.

    James Paul called his older sister Charlotte who matter-of-factly reminded him their mother always used the recipe enclosed in the SureJell box. So much for secret family recipes, I thought. I could feel the wheels coming off my Colonel Sanders vision for a plum jelly empire. We opened one of the dozen SureJell boxes I bought the night before at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and followed the directions that were indeed included with purchase. Charlotte was always the practical one and had a better memory than her brother and her cousin put together when it came to her mother’s cooking.

    *************

    Four hours later, eleven pints of plum jelly jars formed a line like red soldiers on the white kitchen counter. Each lid popped as it sealed to salute us for a job well done. James held a single jar to the light from the window over the kitchen sink and declared it to have the perfect clear plum color. We were happy cousins that afternoon and talked about how good the jelly would be on toast at breakfast. I wanted to taste the final product as soon as we finished, of course, but James told me it should set for a couple of days first. Naturally, he would remember that. We promised to call each other as soon as we took the first bite.

    The taste of the jelly James and I made from plums on a tree in my own yard in 2010 defied description. I called him two days later after the jelly had time to set and asked him what he thought. Cuz, that jelly is about the best I ever had in my life, he said. I’ve eaten it on two pieces of toast this morning. It’s sweet, but still has a little perfect tart taste to it, too. And what did I tell you about the color? Prettiest reddish pink color I ever saw on jelly. I can’t believe we really did make it, can you? I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time. We’ve got a fig tree over here at our house in Navasota that’ll be producing before long. We ought to try making fig preserves, don’t you think?

    Yes, that sounds good. I’ll have to bring your mother’s pots and pans back to you. Fig preserves should be a cinch for us now that we’re experts in the jelly business. I don’t know about you, but I think it’ll be tough for me to buy Smucker’s or Welch’s jelly again with any enthusiasm. Couldn’t agree more, he said. We just have to make what we have last through the winter. That could be a problem, I told him, and we both laughed. 

    I’m not sure if the taste improved with the intensity of the labor or the love James and I shared that Sunday afternoon in our hot Texas kitchen, but I know I ate peanut butter and plum jelly sandwiches for the rest of the summer. My neighbor Jon and I also had a great time together when we made his version of plum jelly from a cyberspace recipe he Googled which was much quicker to make than the SureJell one, or maybe I was just getting the hang of it… or maybe Jon did all the work.

    ****************

    Slava Ukraini. For all the children everywhere.

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 3 The End (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 3 The End (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills – oops, no that wasn’t me; that was Meryl Streep saying the first line from one of my favorite movies Out of Africa.

    I meant to say once upon a time I had a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our back yard on Worsham Street in Montgomery. The first year we were there that plum tree rained plums like pecans off a pecan tree in San Saba, the pecan capital of Texas. For reinforcements to help with the harvest, I first asked my next-door neighbor Jon who brought a ladder to pick the ones higher than I could reach on a tree that was twenty feet tall. He also was the first to suggest we should make plum jelly, an idea I rejected as ludicrous because I didn’t cook anything anymore. Enter my cousin James Paul, my mother’s brother’s son, who lived nearby and volunteered to help make plum jelly because he had my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Hm. He had a secret family recipe for plum jelly so maybe this was a sign I couldn’t ignore.

    Okay, what’s next, I repeated to James who stood beside me in the kitchen but appeared lost in a trance for what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of time. His eyes were closed so long I began to wonder if he’d drifted off to sleep. James, what’s next, I said louder with more than a bit of impatience.

    Well Cuz, I think we need to put a bunch of these plums in some water and boil them for a while. That’s what we maybe need to do first, he finally said.

    What? I asked. You think we maybe need to start by boiling some plums in water for a while? What kind of recipe is that?

    Yeah, I seem to be having a little problem remembering the exact order Mother did things in, he replied. It’s been more than fifty years ago since I was a kid watching her, you know. I figured it would all come back to me, and I think it probably will. Besides, I thought you’d be more help. He stared at me – I stared back.

    Then the lunacy of what we were doing hit us both, and we started laughing together. We were having a good time. It was fun to try to re-create a simpler period in our lives when our people made some of the food we ate in our home kitchens, to reconnect to the lost sense of that family we’d had in those earlier days since we basically were apart our entire adult lives except for an occasional Christmas when our paths crossed in random moments under one roof. We shared the same family roots that gave us joy in our early childhood days, the family that gave us our hopes and dreams for the future. For James and me on a Sunday afternoon in my Worsham Street kitchen in the third act of our lives making plum jelly was an act of faith.

    But what we needed at the moment was a recipe.

    James Paul called his older sister Charlotte who matter-of-factly reminded him their mother always used the recipe enclosed in the SureJell box. So much for secret family recipes, I thought. I could feel the wheels coming off my Colonel Sanders vision for a plum jelly empire. We opened one of the dozen SureJell boxes I bought the night before at the Brookshire Brothers grocery store and followed the directions that were indeed included with purchase. Charlotte was always the practical one and had a better memory than her brother and her cousin put together when it came to her mother’s cooking.

    *************

    Four hours later, eleven pints of plum jelly jars formed a line like red soldiers on the white kitchen counter. Each lid popped as it sealed to salute us for a job well done. James held a single jar to the light from the window over the kitchen sink and declared it to have the perfect clear plum color. We were happy cousins that afternoon and talked about how good the jelly would be on toast at breakfast. I wanted to taste the final product as soon as we finished, of course, but James told me it should set for a couple of days first. Naturally, he would remember that. We promised to call each other as soon as we took the first bite.

    The taste of the jelly James and I made from plums on a tree in my own yard in 2010 defied description. I called him two days later after the jelly had time to set and asked him what he thought. Cuz, that jelly is about the best I ever had in my life, he said. I’ve eaten it on two pieces of toast this morning. It’s sweet, but still has a little perfect tart taste to it, too. And what did I tell you about the color? Prettiest reddish pink color I ever saw on jelly. I can’t believe we really did make it, can you? I had the most fun I’ve had in a long time. We’ve got a fig tree over here at our house in Navasota that’ll be producing before long. We ought to try making fig preserves, don’t you think?

    Yes, that sounds good. I’ll have to bring your mother’s pots and pans back to you. Fig preserves should be a cinch for us now that we’re experts in the jelly business. I don’t know about you, but I think it’ll be tough for me to buy Smucker’s or Welch’s jelly again with any enthusiasm. Couldn’t agree more, he said. We just have to make what we have last through the winter. That could be a problem, I told him, and we both laughed. 

    I’m not sure if the taste improved with the intensity of the labor or the love James and I shared that Sunday afternoon in our hot Texas kitchen, but I know I ate peanut butter and plum jelly sandwiches for the rest of the summer. My neighbor Jon and I also had a great time together when we made his version of plum jelly from a cyberspace recipe he Googled which was much quicker to make than the SureJell one, or maybe I was just getting the hang of it… or maybe Jon did all the work.

    The End

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 2 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    My cousin James Paul texted me the ingredients we needed for our Sunday afternoon plum jelly project, and I was not surprised to discover the only item for the jelly I had in our Worsham Street kitchen was the plums piled high on the counters which meant the Saturday night before we planned to make the plum jelly I made a trip to the regional Brookshire Brothers grocery store that anchored a small shopping center five minutes from our home. I worried I might not be able to find what we needed at the store but was surprised to come upon an entire section of an aisle at Brookshire Brothers that was devoted to canning and preserving. I had forgotten I lived in rural Texas where the homemade goodies sold in downtown Montgomery on the first Saturday of every month regularly included jellies, jams and preserves. Brookshire Brothers knew their market.

    Everything including the two cartons of twelve each one pint sparkling clear new Mason jars (now called Ball jars) was conveniently located in one place. It was as if the grocery store stockers knew my Aunt Mildred’s recipe verbatim, or did everyone make jelly with the same three ingredients…hm…I wondered how I had managed to live sixty-four years without attempting to make any kind of jelly. Just not my jam, I smiled to myself.

    The one exception the Brookshire Brothers aisle lacked was cheese cloth. Apparently no one knew cheese cloth was a necessity except my Aunt Mildred. After searching the entire store twice I resorted to asking the Customer Service woman behind the lottery tickets who not only recognized what cheese cloth was but also left her booth to show me where it was, and I was done. Since time was money and money was money, I made a mental note at checkout to keep a tally of the cost for our homemade plum jelly in case I decided to sell a homemade goody at the July first Saturday event. I had leapfrogged in my mind from making twenty-four jars of jelly to becoming a jelly entrepreneur. Keep cranking out the fruit, O Ye Plum Tree of Plenty.

    True to his word James brought several of his mother’s ancient gigantic aluminum pots and pans to my house the next day. A large wooden mortar and pestle paired with a tall cylindrical-shaped strainer added a dose of authenticity to our cooking implements the following Sunday afternoon. We laid everything out on my kitchen counter next to the mounds of plums in the baskets. James and I stared at the counters and then looked at each other.

    James Paul, as I knew him when we were children, was a handsome man in his mid-fifties. He wasn’t tall—less than six feet—and weighed maybe 135 pounds if he weighed after breakfast. He was a GQ male model size and an equally GQ sexy looking man. His salt-and-pepper short hair was more salt than pepper those days and matched the color of his thick mustache and small goatee. He cut the signature hair he wore during fifteen years of playing bass guitar and singing professionally with bands in honky-tonks, bars, juke joints and community halls around central Texas, he said, because the longer length got to be too much trouble. According to him the only time long hair was worth the effort was when he walked into a bar to make a statement, when he needed the “look.” Now he needed to make a different statement.

    Okay, I said. What’s next? He smiled that slow smile of his and struck a thoughtful pose. He stood quietly, looked around the kitchen, folded his arms, shifted his weight, and finally closed his eyes while I waited and wondered what in the world was going on with him. I assumed he needed a moment to collect his thoughts, but this was getting to be ridiculous. He slowly shook his head. I had a nagging suspicion my plum jelly enterprise was collapsing before it got off the kitchen floor.

    ***********************

    Please stay tuned for Part 3, the final episode of The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree.

  • The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 1 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)

    The Case of the Prolific Plum Tree – Part 1 (from I’ll Call It Like I See It)


    Once upon a time there was a plum tree in the far southwest corner of our backyard in Texas that produced as many plums as a small orchard. When I left our newly acquired house on Worsham Street the first week in May, 2010 to return to South Carolina, the light green plums on the tree were the size of large olives. I picked one and tasted it because I believed they might be gone before I returned for my next visit. It was bitter as gall, hard as the pit of one of those large olives it resembled. I quickly spit it out and sighed. I longed for the sweet, soft, purple plums of my childhood from our tree in Richards. How could the eighteen miles from Richards where I grew up to our home in Montgomery sixty-four years later make such a difference in plums from a random plum tree in the yard? Maybe it was more than time or distance.

    When I returned to our Worsham Street house in Texas from South Carolina a month later, I couldn’t wait to check on my plum tree. To my astonishment, the plums had matured and changed. The first thing I noticed was the fallen ones collected in a heap around the trunk of the tree. I peered closer to see they were a deep red color the way I remembered they should be, but they were the size of golf balls which wasn’t exactly what I recalled. They were in varying stages of decomposition, obviously food for worms and birds that shared our back yard. Then I looked up.

    The tree appeared to be at least twenty feet tall with limbs growing awkwardly in all directions. Several branches were entwined in a wire dangling from a utility pole across the fence in a neighbor’s yard. The tree occupied a corner where four yards in our neighborhood met, and its branches hung down with reckless abandon, no regard for boundaries. The branches were thick with kelly green leaves that tried to hide the fruit, but that was a lost cause. Hundreds of plums filled the tree. Seeing those plums in changing stages of ripeness froze me in my tracks. I stared at my “crop” and stepped back into a time, to a place where a little girl ran through her yard and tasted plums from a tree for the first time. Her delight was the same as mine was today. I pulled a limb closer and smelled a scent more powerful than candles of the same name. I picked one of the larger red ones, took a bite that was as sweet as its aroma. The skin broke easily to release a gush of juice that was decidedly the nectar of the gods; it must’ve been, since I was in plum paradise.

    Every day the plums multiplied. I picked them in the morning before the hot summer Texas heat made the outdoors unbearable. I picked the ones from the lower branches that I could reach without a ladder. One morning Jon, my next-door neighbor, came over and climbed a ladder to drop the ones from the upper limbs to me while I stayed safely on the ground. I gave him some as a thank you gesture. I filled a plastic grocery bag to give it to the neighbors living on the other side of us. I took plums to the women who lived in two houses across the street. I took plums to my mother’s caregivers in Houston. I gave plums to the men who came to work on our air conditioner. I gave plums to the cable guy who adjusted kinks in our cable connections. When my cousin Frances and her husband Lee came for a visit, I sent plums home with them. I considered giving them to strangers walking their dogs past my house. I had to get larger baskets to hold the plums I picked because I couldn’t give them away fast enough. That plum tree was a fruit-producing fool.

    Jon and I discussed the need for a new plan for the prolific plums. With the help of his computer, he researched the possibilities in cyberspace and determined we should make plum jelly. I scoffed at the idea, reminding him I hate to cook. That was the first problem. Secondly, I had visions of my grandmother in her kitchen making plum jelly fifty years ago. The images were fuzzy, but I remembered her sweating over a hot stove in a steaming kitchen for a long time. I didn’t like that picture, and I tried to discourage Jon from the project. He was convinced we should give it a try. I was wavering when I made the mistake of telling my first cousin James Paul who lived less than an hour from me in Navasota about the idea. He immediately jumped on the jelly bandwagon and told me he remembered my Aunt Mildred’s recipe. Not only remembered it, but he had the very pots and pans his mother used when she made her jelly. It couldn’t be that hard, he went on to say. I was outnumbered, and the plums kept piling higher on my kitchen counter.

    ********************

    Please stay tuned for Part 2 of the Plum Adventures.