Plums for Pudding

“Help yourself to plums”, I was told, “and some grapefruit too”.  I didn’t need telling twice.  We are currently parked up on our friends Geoff and Eileen’s property and they have quite a selection of fruit trees growing along the boundary fence. (I’m the only one here who can eat grapefruit, as the other three take medication and are not to eat grapefruit at all).  The plum trees are laden, and the fruit is such a pretty colour.

  Ripe for picking

I gently cooked up a nice big dish of plums, and whipped up a bowl of Vanilla Crème Dessert (that’s just a posh name for Instant Pudding).  There is plenty to go around so we will share our dessert tonight with our hosts.  After all, they supplied the plums!

Plums for pudding

I took another trip out to the orchard and gathered up even more plums - a big bucket full.  (There was a nasty big white-tail spider lurking in the bucket, and Robin had to deal with it for me).  The plums have been washed, packed in sealable plastic bags and popped in the freezer.  They can be cooked up later on, perhaps plum crumble will be on the menu on a  cold winter’s night.  There are still plenty on the tree, so I’ll gather another bucket full for Eileen later on – it would be a shame to let them go to waste.

A bucket full of plums

Muffy came out into the orchard with me, on her lead.  She is getting quite timid as she grows older, and is not showing much inclination to move outside the caravan door these days.  But it is a nice sunny day, and I felt she would benefit from some fresh air and a change of scenery.  When my bucket was full, she was quite happy to trot along side me, and scamper back into the caravan for some more R & R.

Muffy under the fruit trees