why I started the food blog...

Reading about it, thinking about it, eating it (of course) and making it. The one part I don't love as much is the cleaning up after I cook, especially now that I don't have a dishwasher. I got inspired to start my own food blog after lurking around this site, which is simply amazing. Anyway, in homage, I decided to make her cornmeal cake, as the picture and description looked amazing, and as anyone who knows me knows, cooking calms me down. I can be in the foulest of all moods, and simply finding something to make will make me almost instantaniously in a better mood.

Unlike the lovely Molly from Orangette, I do not have jar upon jar of jam sitting around. As a poor college student, I don't have all that much sitting around in my kitchen at all.*

If any of you has a chance, make this cake. It was really quite good, it reminded me of a more comforting version of the 1-2-3-4 cake from Fanny at Chez Panisse, one of my favorite cookbooks from when I was younger.

On my cornmeal cake, I topped with a warm syrup of plum butter. Plum butter is one of the few jam/butter products that I believe really transforms the fruit. Plums themselves are bright and juicy, but this jam is darker, and has more of a wintery feel. In my parents' backyard is a tree that every other year growns more plums than we could ever know what to do with. After making plum cakes and galletes, we inevtiably put every plum we can find into a pot and make this jam.

Plum Butter (adapted from Gourmet, 2001)

1 vanilla bean, halved lengthwise
4 lb ripe plums, cut into 1/2-inch wedges
3 cups sugar
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
Special equipment: 5 (1/2-pint) canning jars with lids and screw bands; a food mill fitted with fine disk

Sterilize jars and lids

Freeze several small plates to use for testing butter.

Scrape seeds from vanilla bean into a 5- to 6-quart heavy pot. Add pod and stir in remaining ingredients. Slowly bring to a rolling boil over moderate heat (this will take about 15 minutes), stirring frequently. Boil, uncovered, stirring frequently, until plums are tender, about 5 minutes.

Discard pod. Purée plums with liquid in batches in food mill set over a bowl. Transfer purée to pot and simmer over low heat, stirring and scraping bottom of pan frequently, until very thick, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours. [the recipe says this is enough time, though I tend to like it thicker]

Drain jars upside down on a clean kitchen towel 1 minute, then invert. Ladle plum butter into jars, leaving 1/4 inch of space at top, then run a thin knife between plum butter and jar to eliminate air bubbles.

Seal, process, and store filled jars, boiling plum butter in jars 10 minutes.
Let plum butter stand in jars at least 1 day for flavors to develop.

Makes 4 or 5 (1/2-pint) jars.

*this is a lie. We always have random stuff to use in our kitchen... tamarind paste from India, red curry paste, many kinds of pickles, weird canned foods they sell at the coop, whatever vegi looks particularly good at HPP....