This oven roasted spiced plum butter is a delicious way to preserve early autumn plums. Also known as pflaumenmus, it’s a traditional German preserve that is very much worth making.
I first discovered The Wednesday Chef sometime in early 2006. I had become an avid reader of blogs about a year before (they were a great way to keep my mind off my terrible day job) and was always on the hunt for new sites to add to my list of bookmarks. Luisa’s voice and perspective on food resonated with me immediately. I spent a morning engrossed in her archives and once caught up, tried never to miss a new post.
In fact, it’s fairly safe to say that I’ve read nearly everything that Luisa Weiss has ever posted to the internet (I hope that doesn’t make me sound like a stalker. I swear, I’m just a fan). And, when an advanced copy of My Berlin Kitchen arrived just before the mini-vacation that Scott and I took few weeks back, I tucked it into my travel bag and proceeded to read it in a single, giant gulp.
As I read, I dog-eared recipes I wanted to remember. I marked the Pizza Siciliana and the Poppy Seed Whirligig Buns. I’m hoping to make the Yeasted Plum Cake before their season is entirely gone and, come Christmas, I’m definitely planning on making the Fruit Bread on page 161. It sounds dense and divine.
As I read, there was one recipe that jumped out at me more insistently than the rest and cried out to be made immediately. The Pflaumenmus or Spiced Plum Butter on page 237 had my name written all over it (particularly since I had the necessary four pounds of Italian prune plums at home, thanks to the Washington State Fruit Commission and their Canbassador program).
Of course, I’ve made plum butters before, but never with this particular technique. Luisa has you quarter the plums, stir them together with a bit of sugar, a cinnamon stick, and a couple cloves and let them sit overnight. The next day, once they’re nice and juicy, you pop the pan into the oven and bake them them at moderate heat.
After their time in the heat, the plums are incredibly tender and fragrant. The liquid has thickened a great deal and the slumping fruit just smells incredible.
Once pureed, she has you funnel the prepared butter into sterilized jars and use the inversion method to seal. This is the only place where I diverged from the recipe as written and I chose to run my jars through a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Because this is a relatively low sugar preserve, I wanted to ensure that all bacteria was killed and the best way to do that is with a hot water bath.
Now, just a note about the yield. The recipe says that it makes four to five jars, but doesn’t specify the sizes of those jars. I found that after pureeing, I had exactly enough butter to fill three pint jars. I imagine the jars Luisa used were a bit smaller than a standard pint and so figure my yield was just about right (I did the math and found that had I used the 1/5 L Weck jars, I’d have filled exactly five jars).
I plan on applying this same overnight maceration and oven roasting to other fruits, because it made for such a nice finished product and filled my apartment with the most delicious smells.
Disclosure: Viking sent me an advanced copy of My Berlin Kitchen and are providing the copy for this giveaway. However, I’ve not been paid to host this giveaway and my opinions are entirely my own.
Spiced Plum Butter
Ingredients
- 4 pounds Italian prune plums
- 2 cups sugar
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 2 whole cloves
Instructions
- Pit and quarter the plums and put them in a heavy 4-quart pot. Add the sugar, the cinnamon stick, and the cloves. Stir well and let sit overnight or four 8 hours.
- The next day, heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the pot, unlidded, into the oven and cook for 2 hours, stirring the mixture occasionally.
- Sterilize the glass jar and lids in boiling water.
- When the plums have broken down and the liquid has reduced to a thick jam, remove pot from the oven and fish out the cinnamon stick (if you can find the cloves, fish them out too).
- Puree the jam with an immersion blender until it resembles a fruit butter, and then fill the sterilized jars with the hot puree, screw on tops and immediately turn the jars upside down. If you prefer a jam with discernible chunks of fruit, however, don’t puree the jam; simply ladle the hot jam into the sterilized jars.
- Let the jars cool complete before turning the right side up again and labeling them. The jam will keep for at least a year.
(Marisa’s note: You can also process the jars in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes if you’d prefer to do it the American way.)
Recipe from My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes) by Luisa Weiss, published by Viking, 2012.
Hands down, my favorite food memory is my grandfather, hauling out that giant enamel pot (which now seems quite small compared to the various stock pots I use, but was enormous when I was little), and making halupkis in it. Halupkis, or as I grew up calling them, pigs in a blanket, are simply stuffed cabbages. I never liked the cabbage growing up, and would just pick out the meat and rice filling. Now, I clean my plate!
My favorite food memory is delicious food while camping, especially s’mores. Everything tastes good outside.
Chicken Soup! My mom used to make chicken soup for my two children every time they were sick. By the time my son was 8 he was convinced he only got better because of grandma’s soup.
My favorite food memory would be my late grandmother’s dumplings. She was a wonderful Czechoslovakian woman who made the best dumplings. They were not potato dumplings, but rather flour dumplings and they were fabulous. We made a tape of her maiing them once, which embarassed her terribly. And when she was almost done, she realized she had left out one ingredient, so she insisted she start over! I treasure that tape and the memory of her dumplings…and her!
My favorite food memory is learning to make Funny Cake (a family Pennsylvania Dutch recipe) from my grandma.
My favourite food memory is the whole family working together to chop vegetables for a Russian salad, my favourite kind!
In most families, the holiday meal seems to revolve around the turkey, in ours it is all about the stuffing! More specifically, the greek stuffing. It is only served twice a year, once on Thanksgiving and once at Christmas. As with all of Grandma’s recipes it was not written down. When I was a teenager, Grandma told us all that making the Thanksgiving meal was getting to be too much for her. At my mother’s insistence, I went to help grandma and it was actually really fun to spend that time with her. That year I learned how to make the stuffing. Grandma is gone now, but I still make the stuffing every year and it brings back my memories of her and makes me glad I took the time to learn how to make it and can pass the recipe down.
I have so many favorite food memories but this peach that I ate in Italy when I was a teen still occupies a lot of space in my mind! This peach butter sounds delish and I love italian plums. gotta get to meat farms!
I have an awful lot of them, but most recently, spending the evening of my birthday on the porch, eating homegrown fried green tomatoes, and listening to my husband play his guitar.
Making pizzelles with my grandmother.
I loved my grandmother’s cinnamon rolls and the little bowl of boiled potatoes in the fridge!
Grandma’s golabkis on slow cook in the oven all day long!
Eating waffles with powdered sugar on the beach in France with my cousins — I must have been about 4 years old as I was wearing the most fab 70’s giraffe printed pants.
One of my favorite food memories is of the restaurant that my sister and two of our friends created when we were 10 or 11 years old. We planned the menu, typed it up, sent invitations, did all the shopping and cooking for a one night restaurant for our parents. There were lots of messes, some burned spaghetti, and a very imperfect meal but it was successful enough that the restaurant opened again the following summer.
Hot cocoa and toast with peanut butter, made on a camp stove and enjoyed while watching bald eagles nesting on a nearby island, at our campsite at Acadia National Park in Maine.
I have too many to choose one! I will say, however, that some of the best involve cooking with my mother and grandmothers and learning at their sides.
My favorite childhood food memories are of saturday morning baking: cake, pie, coffee cake, cookies, doughnuts etc. Yes, mom had a sweet tooth!
My favorite food memory is my grandmother’s concord grape juice – homemade, home canned, and always served out of this tiny little amber glass tumblers…!
Favorite memory, without doubt, is picking crabs with my entire family at our family reunion.
My favorote food memory is watching my great grandmother cook in her kitchen. She had no recipes and didn’t use measuring cups. She made her biscuits and cornbread by sight and feel. Miss her.
My grandparents had an old ice cream maker, and one of my favorite part of summer family gatherings (4 generations worth of folks) was the sound of that ice cream maker, helping my grandfather add rock salt and ice, and the taste of the ice cream. Always made with fresh Colorado Rocky Ford peaches. Yum!
I remember my mom making strawberry jam that way once, years ago… she didn’t mean to either! she had sugared her berries and let them set over night, but she put them in the oven to keep the ants off..so she says, but had the oven on very low. the resulting product was almost a fruit leather…. very dense and surprisingly good… thanks for an interesting jam recipe..! the book sounds great, by the way, the perfect combination, novel and recipes!
How to pick just one…. Every year my grandmother would make enormous amounts of candy around Christmas time. While I was in college, she would send me a box of it. My friends figured this out and would come by to “help” me with my “problem” because she’d just send a little bit of everything and I never told her that there were some kinds I didn’t like. 🙂
I have a colleague who, when she can find Italian prune plums, makes an old family recipe for prune plum cake. It’s so delicious that I know this butter has to be amazing.
I always loved going down south to the grandparents’ and gorging on canned peaches!
That plum jam looks fantastic, and the book sounds fascinating!
I have a plum tree but have no idea what kind of plum it is. Would you be able to tell me the difference in an Italian plum. These are a bit tart which I love. This recipe sounds like one I would love to try if the plums I have are the right ones!!
I love this overnight and oven-roasting idea!
My favorite food memory is just being around food. Both of my parents cooked and baked and they always found a way to let me and my siblings help.
Before we and our friends had children, we used to have seasonal meal get-togethers. A theme was decided upon, and the host would create a great meal based on that theme. Amongst the group we have lactose intolerance, vegetarians and meat lovers, and it was always a challenge. We all live in different locations, so everyone would have to travel and we’d spend the weekend together. It’s been much more difficult with children, but we do manage a dinner and a brunch every year.
My favorite food memories also include memories of my mother, especially cooking with her over the holidays. And I loved her chicken and dumplings!
Most of my favorite food memories have to do with my grandmother and her speaking to me in Cajun French. When I was very young I thought we had our own language. One memory in particular is sitting in her kitchen learning to make fig preserves after I’d spent the entire morning picking figs from her tree. Buckets and buckets of delicious figs! Oh, she also made the best split pea soup I’ve ever had.
Favorite food memory would be eating cookie dough in my grandma’s kitchen … looking back, this was where my love for baking began.
I love fruit butters. I can eat them with just a spoon or my favorite is slathered on crackers. Such a comfort snack.
One of my favorite food memories is the stove top jam my grandmother made from her canned summer berries. She made homemade biscuits and poured the jam overtop. It was delicious! So she only used the sugar when needed and canned the berries whole w/o the sugar. Saved her money initially during canning season.
Love the Plum Butter recipe and will check out her blog today.
One of my early food memories is of my German grandmother saving the peach peels (and pits) from canning peaches to use for an infusion to make peach jelly. I was very surprised but don’t remember the finished product! She also saved potato peels to plant the tiny “eyes” instead of larger pieces one could eat. This was in the 40’s.
My favorite memory is my Dad and I sitting on the porch eating pumpkin butter on crackers. It was our quiet time on Saturday mornings from the time I started school until I moved out. I still can’t eat pumpkin butter without thinking of our fun times together.
One of my favorite food memories, was when my parents I still lived in Germany. Every year before Christams we would go to the Christkindlmarkt (Christmasmarket) eat the freshly grilled Nurnberger Bratwurst (basically the same as a regular Bratwurst, but smaller and you usually eat three on a roll) along with Kinder Gluehwein (mulled juice). That plus the smells of the roasting nuts and gingerbread, were the sure signs that Christmas was around the corner.
A favorite memory-“helping” my grandmother bake scrumptious pies. She rolled out leftover scraps of dough and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on them for the grand kids.
My favorite food memories are all the times I’ve spent in the garden, harvesting, then bringing things in the house and making jam or canning. It’s a slow, deliberate process that I get to repeat regularly and that I get to enjoy year round.
My grandma’s rhubarb crunch on Sunday afternoon!
my favorite food memory: my mother’s pork roast dinner with crispy brown potatoes. We used to come home from church on Sunday to the delicious smell in the house. Now, she can get us all home for dinner by just mentioning that she is making pork roast.
I can’t say that I have one exact food memory, but when I visit my sister Kath in Maine, (who is a wonderful cook AND baker!) my vacation is almost all about food. Daily we start with discussions – over coffee and her Jewish Apple Cake – at breakfast about what we’re having for dinner that night to heading out on adventures and going from little bakeries to the big grocery store shopping for yummy items. Then of course we have to stop somewhere for lunch and then head home to rest up and have another cup of coffee or tea with a little sweet. Then its prep for dinner time! No matter what my sister makes, it’s delicious and it’s mostly about love and how she shows it! Looking forward to visiting her for Christmas…the first time in about 25 years we’ll spend the holiday together!
I just plain old stink at cooking…and I imagine my family would love some yummy creations presented to them at the table, rather than Burger Helper. One time. they all said they weren’t hungry, and I caught them making PBJ sandwiches an hour later. I felt terrible, and have since tried to be a better cook, but it’s hit and miss. I need some hits!
I just saw this book at the bookstore this week and was hoping to read it! The plum jam reminded me of my Oma who used to make a delicious plum tart every fall.
Goodness, that plum butter sounds good!
It’s hard to come up with THE greatest food memory ever, but one that I will always love will be the vegetable soup from a restaurant in the town where I used to spend summers. I was always happiest with a bowl of that soup, and I associate it with my favorite place.
Hands down, my favorite food memory has to be home made chicken soup. It’s medicinal value is priceless. Nothing else can make me feel better when I am under the weather.
My daughter’s father made me saltcod stew with cream of coconut and cabbage. It was served with brown rice and roadside flowers in a can on the table.
My favorite food memory is my mom’s Breakfast Casserole every Christmas! Every time I make it, it brings me right back.
I just recently got taught to make taschana from scratch from a 90 year old woman who didn’t speak English. After the first session involving pungent sheep’s yogurt she made from her son’s sheep, she shooed me out and I didn’t even know when she’d come back for me ( now I know, overnight the taschana needs to rise). She’d talk to me in Greek as I’d rub the taschana between my fingers on her bed hoping she wasn’t telling me I was doing it all wrong. A few hours later, I returned to do it again and an orange-aid later I finally got the small crumbles of taschana you need. I only need to glance at the small jar on my desk to remember the cool dark environment of her summer kitchen/bedroom.
Favorite food memory? How to choose? I was only 4 when my grandfather died. Because he was so sick for a couple of years before that, Mom would pack us up and go spend half of almost every week at her parents house. Some of my food memories from that time are the sweetest. Like the time that I was shucking corn with Grandpa before dinner and he let me eat half of one raw. I was only 3 and it was so exciting. Or that he always let me slip my egg yolks onto his plate at breakfast because I didn’t like them.
I just love decorating Christmas cookies with my family. There are some traditions that will NEVER get old…
So many memories! Learning how to make all those savory and sweet Greek foods with my Mom. She spent literally hours teaching me how to make home made philo dough. Wish she were still here to see how much I have progressed. She was the first to introduce me to canning, too, back when we used those big jars with the rubber bands and metal bales.
My favorite food memory is watching my grandma peel potatoes over the sink. She was a great cook, made yummy mashed potatoes. They always turned yellow because she used so much butter. I wish she were still here…
I have been addicted to canning for the last few years. Your Yellow Tomato Basil Jam is my absolute favorite. My friends hope that it is part of the menu when they come to my house for dinner.
Food is my #1 way to make memories so there are so many… but one of my only memories of my grandfather, who passed away when I was very young, was sitting at his kitchen table together eating jam directly out of the jar and giggling with guilt that we would get caught!
My favorite food memory is my grandmother’s blintzes……….they were so very good!
My favorite food memory is making peanut brittle with my mom. Everyone asked her for the recipe, but no one could make it like my mom. Now, I’m carrying on the holiday tradition at my house.
I think my favorite food memory is eating fresh caught fish in Mexico. They served a giant flounder with lots of lemon juice and herbs… We were at a little hole in the wall that looked horrible, but was heaven on earth.
It would be having boiled dinner with my mom and now with my daughter.
Boiled dinner is a ham, potatoes, carrots, turnips, and cabbage all boiled together
My mom used to make corned beef hash from scratch. This was my favorite. I love to watch her grind everything up and then cook it and top each serving with egg. Thanks for the memory; I haven’t thought of that in quite a while.
The food memories are mostly from my Mom’s side of the family; we lived upstairs of my Great Grandma so we were exposed to her traditions. I think my earliest memory is Saturday morning shopping; going from one grocery store to another to buy what was on sale. In the summer we would add the farmers market and then the last stop every Saturday was the bakery. Ah, those special days when we would come home from the marketing and have some special tidbit to eat. Maybe fresh bread and some lunch meat or a piece of Grandma’s homemade kuchen. Just thinking of this warms my heart.
I have so many great food memories, it’s hard to single out one. What comes to mind first is baking pies with my mom. She taught me how to make a perfectly crimped crust when I was about eight.
My mom used to make spiced walnuts every Christmas, which were not only tasted heavenly, but made the house smell wonderful, too. I make them for my family and friends today.
My favorite food memory is while living in California we had the most prolific apricot tree we used to can like mad and still gave away laundry baskets full of fruit to others. I have never again tasted an apricot as delicious as those.
My favorite food memory is helping my Grandmother prepare Christmas dinner when I was a little kid. I mostly peeled potatoes and cut up beans and so forth, but I still loved it.
I am so excited by this method~ looking forward to trying it out. A favorite food memory is my grandma’s peach pie for my 12th birthday dessert at her house. I’ve always loved pie and fruit desserts more than cake, and she was surprised that I asked for something other than a birthday cake.
My favorite food memory is biting into a fresh Fay Alberta peach that was on the tree mere minutes before.
My favorite food memory is biting into a fresh Fay Alberta peach that was on the tree mere minutes before.
wowsers! What an awesome givaway. One of my favorite food memories in relation to canning is being 8 or 9 and absolutely amazed that my 90+ yr old great grandma could peal a peach with a knife and peel it in 1 long continuous peel. Talent…and practice. Yes, I can do it continously now, but I use a peeler =) Hope to win!
My favorite food memory would be my great grandmothers fried apple pies off her wood cook stove. Delicious!
This would be a great book to share with my Dad, who lived outside of Berlin when he was a little boy right after WWII. He is fruit crazy, and I remember him drying and preserving fruit all throughout my childhood…even making a fruit dryer out of an old refrigerator and drying all of our Italian prunes. I guess that’s what you do when you nearly starved to death as a child…
My favorite food memory is standing alongside my mother, grandmother and aunties and learning the magic of cooking for others.
This is one cookbook that really sounds interesting. I would love to try some of these.
My favorite food memory was the first time I canned. It was tomatoes and they all turned out great. And of course the first time I pressure canned anything. I sat in the kitchen the entire time and prayed I had done it right so it wouldn’t explode. The best canned green beans I ever ate that winter for sur. LOL
When I was a kid my dad worked nights. A couple of times a month he would bring home a pizza from the best pizza joint ever, wake me up (this was at around 2:00 am), and the two of us, just my dad and me, would sit in the kitchen and eat pizza and talk. Just the two of us, none of my siblings (I’m the oldest).
I have a lot of great food memories, but this is hands-down my favorite.
I would love to win this book for two reasons; I am a voracious reader and it sound marvelous and I am a beginning canner and want to try that plum jam.
My favorite cooking memory was when my husband’s grandmother set out to teach me how to make perogies. “you start with a pile of flour”…. What an experience.
I am so interested in trying plum butter with this method. The whole discussion reminds me of a fond food memory: being with my grandmother in her kitchen for hours and hours as she stirred her apple butter. Nothing smelled better than that.
Ooh, I’m a Canbassador too! Hurray for canning, and thank you for always sharing so many inspired recipes! This one sounds like an excellent destinations for plums, and boy do I have plenty. At the moment, unrelated to any official duties, I’m listening to jars of Greengage plum preserves ping shut (plums from a friend’s tree) and just finished off an Italian plum cake (plums from my tree)–not Luisa’s plum cake recipe, although I look forward to trying it as well! So thank you for this recipe and helping me to keep up my plum-processing enthusiasm. 🙂
A favorite memory of mine from growing up–since I do want that book and haven’t ordered it yet–is the smell of my parents’ canning kitchen (yes, it’s a separate kitchen–not at all fancy, but it avoids heating up the whole house all summer!) as they juice/jam/can the produce from their orchard.
My favorite food memory is me as a growing child, eating an impossible amount of bacon and pancakes on Saturday mornings.
I have several food memories especially from my gramma back in the 1960’s but the one I have as an adult was the first (of two) dates I had with hubby. He didn’t know I was vegetarian!So he took me to the best steak house in town. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I ordered fish and only nibbled the crispy coating. I took it home, confessing I was too nervous to eat. My dad loved it! Next month, 40 years!
My mom making pizza and telling me that it needed to look as good as it tasted. It looked wonderful but when she took it out of the oven she dropped it. We looked at each other and just laughed.
When I was a small child, my Italian grandmother–who was THE best cook–would top her incredible baked ziti with sliced hard boiled eggs as a “treat” for me and my sister. 🙂 We thought that was great!
So many memories, it is hard to choose one! When I was sick I remember my mom would make rice pudding for me. I still love it when I’m under the weather. 🙂
My favorite food memory has to be just about anything I helped my grandmother cook/bake. But there was one time when, as a family, we went berry picking – for elderberries in some spot a buddy of my dad’s had told him about. We took all these berries home – my dad juiced some to make wine, the rest went to jelly. The jars were all filled hot and then topped w/ paraffin. My dad took some of the berries to work w/ him that Monday to give to the guy who told him where to go pick. Turned out they were NOT elderberries! Eeek! They were thankfully edible, but were some kind of Indian Ink Berry.
My favorite food memory is helping to make homemade soup with my Slovenian grandpa every Saturday morning. Also, helping grandma make Potica and homemade noodles for the soup!
My favorite food memory would have to be makeing christmas goodies with my Mom. She made almost all of our Christmas sweets, breads, cookies, fudges, candies. I still carry on the tradition of makeing just about all of our christmas sweets. We also have a tradition in which everyone in our family makes each others gifts. I just think it makes it more personal.
My favorite food memory is,
garden fresh tomatoes that my
Dad would cut up into a bowl
Add a little olive oil & salt.
He’d get 2 forks and a loaf of
fresh Italian. We would sit
down and share the tomatoes
and torn bread. He passed away
a couple years ago. The first summer
after I cut up my tomatoes and grabbed
my bread the first taste I burst into
tears. He isn’t with me to enjoy that
tradition any longer. I still love my
tomatoes with bread but something
Is missing…….him 🙁
my favorite food memory is hunting for mushrooms
A fond food memory is my discovery of how much I loved homemade dill pickles at 5 years old. My godfather had made a batch which everyone else found too sour…I on the other hand thought they tasted divine and got to sit on his knee eating nearly the whole jar while everyone looked on and laughed. My mom fretted I would make myself sick…! Lol. I was fine and to this day love a good dill pickle.
Fav food memory is measuring all the ingredients for chocolate chip cookies with my mom. Then my dad would cream the butter and sugars by hand and we would all plop the dough on cookie sheets and enjoy them hot out of the oven. Runner up memory…annual canning of green beans. It was a family affair!!
favorite food memory? I think we make one every day. Tonite it was picking blackberries with my kids at dusk… mouths purple and sweet, fall chill drifting into the fields from the ocean, a total delight as the kids debated which recipe to use on our bounty on the way home. What better memory could I give them than that? Food, love and fresh air.
favorite food memory… sheesh. just one? an early one is my mom letting me drink all the “corn juice” in the serving dish once the corn was all eaten. I had been sick and sletp thru dinner, so I missed the actual corn, but the juice was so sweet and good. I do make corn broth now sometimes and think of my mom that day, she was surprised that I wanted it. 🙂
My favorite food memory would have to be putting together the family dessert table every Thanksgiving. Everyone wants to make something, so you never end up eating much of any of the dishes, but it’s so nice to be together and have everyone participate.
My favorite food memories are of family reunions at some warf mounted restaurant where I learned how to eat crab by watching my parent, aunts, uncles and cousins. I love a giant pot of steaming crabs with Old Bay to this day even though I live so far away my crab eating is limited to the rare summer trip home or the amazing shipment my brother sent me for my birthday this year.
So many wonderful food memories – one that stands out is camping out with best friends, grilling peaches & eating them with foie gras around the campfire. Gritty decadence.
My favorite food memory is eating a slice of my grandmother’s (Bohemian) Hoska bread, lightly toasted and dripping with butter. Imagine brioche, studded with blanched almonds and golden raisins. Outstanding. She would gift everyone with loaves at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we would look forward to it for months, and practically mourn when it was gone.
Hm, I think I’ll be trying to make some this year. Thanks for prompting the memory!
My favorite food memory is watching my mom make hot water cornbread and fried cabbage.
My favorite food memory is Gravenstein applesauce. My grandmother used to make it every day for dinner. When I grew up and moved to the desert I forgot about that wonderful aroma of the apples. Now whenever I get a chance to get some of those wonderful fragrant apples, I buy as many as I can, bring them home and make my own applesauce. My mind swims with those memories of my grandmother and her applesauce.
Yum!!!! This looks so good!!! I would have to say that my favorite food memory would be making Christmas cookies with my Mom!
My favorite food memory….baking Christmas cookies with my mom….the most amazing cookie maker:)
the first time i canned – i made strawberry mint jam with my great-grandmother’s canning supplies. i don’t think i’ve ever felt such satisfaction in something that i made or such a connection to someone i’ve never met.
growing up, every sunday after church we’d head over to my grandparent’s house (my mother’s parents) and my grandfather would make pancakes. every week. it was a tradition for as long as i could remember, until one sunday we decided to pick up tacos instead, and a new tradition was born. it’s funny how you remember things like that so vividly.
My favorite food memory is, waiting for the soft serve ice cream truck with my Dad. I can still taste it 🙂 Thanks for making me remember.
I discovered Luisa’s blog pretty early on and have read consistently since. Her voice is so genuine, so real, and so approachable. I’ve heard so many amazing things about the book and have been meaning to pick up a copy…though winning one would sure be great 😉 As for food memories, I have many, but one of my favorites is making blinis with my grandmother, who passed away nearly 2 years ago. She has always been my inspiration in the kitchen–a fearless cook and a do-it-all type of lady.