Plum Tired

My first week of overtime was not so bad.  I normally leave the house at 6:00am and get home about 5:00pm, Monday through Thursday.  That includes my 1-1/2 hour roundtrip commuting time.  On Fridays, I leave the house at 6:00am but get off work at 1:00pm.  I still get home about the same time though because I go have lunch in town with a girlfriend of mine and then grocery shop before I head home.  With the first week of overtime, I worked until 6:00pm and got home around 7:00pm Monday through Thursday.  I planned to work until 5:00pm Friday, but decided around 4:00pm that enough was enough.  I still got in 10 hours of overtime for the week and will see that money on a separate check around mid-June. 

With overtime every day, we planned easy suppers and Yeoldfurt took care of the outside chores by himself most evenings.   I guess I was feeling guilty for not doing my share of chores around here during the week so I got a little ambitious this morning.  I started about 8:00 this morning and by noon, I had made two loaves of Chili Pepper Bread for the freezer, cooked up a batch of Anasazi beans for supper and made eight pints of plum jelly with the rest of the plums we picked at our neighbor's last weekend.  I enlisted Yeoldfurt's help in pouring the jelly into the canning jars.  I had to school him a little on the definition of 'finger-tight' but by the eighth jar, he was a pro.  All six jars have sealed now and we'll take half of them to our good neighbor who provided the plums.

When I boiled the plums for the jelly, I ended up with about a cup and a half of pulp and skins from the fruit.  I don't like to see anything go to waste and the whole time I was stirring the plum juice to make the jelly, I was trying to figure out a way to use the fruit pulp.  I decided to get my bread machine back out and try Plum Bread.  I made my standard bread recipe, except I added the fruit pulp, substituted 1/4 cup maple syrup for the 1/4 cup oil and added a tablespoon of cinnamon.  If it comes out, it would be a good for breakfast ... sliced, toasted and spread with cream cheese.   Thanks to our neighbor sharing his fruit, we have about a gallon of dehydrated plums, eight pints of plum jelly and at least one loaf of sweet bread.  Makes me look forward all the more to when our fruit trees really get established. 

I'm tired but I feel like I've accomplished a lot and I still have most of the weekend left.  I hope to harvest and dehydrate the potatoes this weekend.  But maybe on Monday we'll just play.