Plums...

Anybody have a good recipe that requires plums? Tarts? Cookies? Cake? Cobbler?

Last week I found a recipe in Gourmet Magazine for a plum tart and since we were having company during the weekend, I thought I'd try it out on them before I fed it to my book club, The Sexy Savants. (I didn't pick the name)

I zipped into Costco and bought the required bushel of plums, because that's the way they sell things there--in enormous bulk. At the time, bulk made sense. I'd be serving the same yummy dish to approximately thirteen people, so the more plums the merrier!

Before I served the tart on Sunday, I gave our guests my disclaimer: "You are the first victims to be served this dish. Please, give me your honest opinion, I'm thinking about serving it to my book club, The Sexy Savants, on Friday night."

They said they loved it but after they'd gone home and I collected the dessert plates, the truth was in the pudding, I mean the tart. And it wasn't pretty. Remember when you were a kid and you didn't want to eat your food, so you "fooled" your parents by pushing everything around the outside of the plate? I rest my case.

I asked my husband (the man who just last week I told "you're the most honest person I know, Rick, I so appreciate that in you.) Maybe I spoke too soon, maybe honesty isn't all it's cracked up to be.

I couldn't get him to commit to saying it was sthe worst dessert he'd ever eaten (really how bad could plums be swimming in a brown sugar/port syrup), he did, however, comment on how tasty the ribs he BBQ'd were. (they were tender and juicy--but I was having a crisis)

So, I have a partial bushel of plums sitting on the kitchen counter fermenting into whatever plums ferment into and I don't know what to do with them. Soon gnats will be buzzing all over the place and then I won't have to worry about it. I still won't have a yummy dessert, though.

I checked the Food Network certain I'd find the perfect recipe, and I did, except it only serves six. Doubling the recipe means I need more plums (which won't have ripened to the same degree of sweetness as the others) so that won't work, not to mention that we'd be eating plum tarts until July. And we all know where the tart calories would go, don't we? I thought I could make the recipe plus one half, but how do you half an egg? See my dilemma?

The ridiculous thing is that hardly anyone reads this damn blog so the chances of squeezing a recipe out of anyone is pretty slim.


Maybe someone out there in cyberspace who has a plum tree in their backyard will psychically intuit me need and send a recipe...I'd be forever grateful and so would the book club.