Plum-Verbena Jam

In a way, this jam is what started me on the road to writing this latest book. It happened last summer when I noticed a family member's plum tree was laden with fruit–pounds and pounds of delicious plums about to go to waste in the worst way possible, by rotting on the ground. We harvested the whole tree and got so many plums. We gave many away, we made plum jam, we froze a lot, I met Asiya from Forage Oakland and some of the plums ended up gracing the giant Eat In at Dolores Park during Slow Food Nation. You can see some of the photos in this post.

Here is the jam cooking. About halfway done.

Testing for the gel point. Not yet.

Getting the jars ready.

I don't, as a rule, process my jam. Shhhh! don't tell the USDA, but I wanted to test the recipe without a canner for people who want to process and don't have one. It worked beautifully. Just put a dish towel on the bottom of a large stock pot and go to it. I processed for 5 minutes.