Summer fruit... an abundance.

My sister was kind enough to share her over abundance of plums with us.

There were a lot more than I show in this bowl and they were very ripe. This is a busy week for me and I knew I wouldn't have time to make jam or even a tart. 
Time to freeze them for later. Most stone fruit: plum, apricots, peaches, nectarines, pluots, apriums, pleaches and apriarines freeze beautifully. By the way I made those last two names up, theses days they are making some interesting combinations ;-)
 
I had forgotten how to process/cut the stone fruit for easy freezing. 
Here's a quick reminder so you can save that summer abundance.
Start with a cookie sheet lined with wax paper. 
Some stone fruit cling to their pits, which is the pits !

You can see how messy those top few plums are, and I lost a lot of juice trying to wrestle the pit out.

Here's one I gave up on. I think, Bob ended up eating that one.




Then I remembered what I call the mango trick. I first learned this technique while living on Maui with a mango tree in my backyard. We would cut on either side of the huge hairy seed and have two lovely halves to feast on. It works amazingly well to do the same thing with stone fruit.

Start by looking for the crease in your piece of fruit, that will indicate where the pit is lurking.

You want to cut just slightly to one side of the stem end, parallel to the crease. Do the same thing to the other side.

You will have have lots of lovely halves, pit-free!

You will notice some waste of the flesh on either side of the pit, you can remove this with two cuts on either side of the pit.

Look at all that beautiful fruit you have to freeze. Cover that with another sheet of waxed paper and stick it in your freezer. When they have froze solid, remove them from the cookie sheet and store in a ziplock bag. Don't forget to label it with the contents and date.

Here are a few recipes to use that summer fruit:

Rustic fruit tart
Summer fruit tart
Clafouti
Easy fruit jam
Fruit crisp
Fruit ice cream

Enjoy !