Unplugged #5: FRUIT!!!

FRUIT! What a great subject for this week's Unplug Your Kids theme.

As usual, we spent lots of time blackberry picking. Here's one walk's haul. I'm running out of room in my freezer, but the season's starting to trail off, as well.

Last week, I made a bowl of these berries into jam, which I had intended for my Hard project, but it would have worked just as well for this week's fruit theme!

Looking over our fruit, I realized our bananas were spoiling faster than I could eat them, so we made banana bread using this recipe. I wanted to use up as many bananas as possible since I had four on their way out, but man, four wasn't enough! So I added a few extra plums. The result was just fine, though there was something lacking from the bread that I couldn't put my finger on... spices, maybe?

That would be smashed bananas in the background, not scrambled eggs...

This fruit assessment of course made me realize that I forgot to eat my bag of plums from Rocky's tree (out of sight, out of mind... it's hard enough just keeping up with 100 yards of blackberries) so we decided to make Plumplesauce! The apples we picked during Tree week were too wrinkly to eat, but were happy to be rescued into a sauce. (Here's where I'm going to hope you can't count backwards, and if you can, I'll hope you'd think those were the oldest of the apples we used, which... they weren't, I found a few hiding in the fridge from after Bella was ... erm, born. *crickets chirping* Cider, anyone?)


Actually, the Plumplesauce was amazing and delightfully PINK! and well worth the effort of smushing the goop through a sieve for consistency. This would be a fun fall outdoor project for kids, since the smushing is so satisfying. No pictures though, since Dave was at work and I'm a messy multitasker. It was so delicious that I froze some so that Bella can taste it when she's older :O)

And of course, how could we end the week without begging the question, "Fruit or Vegetable?" These are the last of our golden tomatoes and the only fruit from our porch garden this year. Perhaps we'll graduate to more plants next year. Regardless, they made yummy little bruschetta toppings.