Bloody, bloody plums

In the middle of cooking my tortilla and cheese dinner the other night, I had to run to the store because my dog was out of chicken. While I was there I decided we needed something sweet...I was out of chocolate chips, my usual snack. There are no bulk bins at Ridiculous Randalls, so all I had was produce. So I got a bunch of plums.

When I was a kid plums were my favorite fruit ever. I have such vivid memories of standing in front of the fridge and chowing them down on hot summer days. But I've struggled to recapture that flavor. I don't know if plums are going downhill in general or maybe we just had really good ones in Vermont?

I took a chance and got three, which I decided I would cook and then eat on one of the homemade tortillas--it would be a little makeshift crostata/tart. I sliced them into thin wedges and cooked them with a generous squeeze of lemon juice and a few spoonfuls of turbinado sugar. I cooked until the juice got sticky and they were quite jelly-like and glazed.

For the "crust" I rolled out a slightly thicker tortilla, and heated up little canola oil in my nonstick pan (I had visions of a puffy, fritter-like crust but there was no way I was deep frying...way too messy, fattening, and hot...but maybe with a little oil I'd get some richness). I cooked the tortilla and topped it with the hot plums, and sprinkled them with a little more sugar. It looked great:

Put it in the fridge to cool down. After dinner we shared it. Well, it was amazing. The plums seemed to be both more sweet and more sour than when fresh. They actually slightly burned my tongue--in a fabulous way. I was glad I hadn't added cinnamon or vanilla as I'd been thinking of. They were pure and perfect, like the plums of childhood summers but on steroids. The tortilla didn't really add much for me, but Scott liked it a lot.

A couple days later I cooked up a big batch of plums in the same way. This time they came out even better, not sure why. The color was the most beautiful electric red--the perfect thing to eat while watching my current favorite show True Blood! I dished out a bowlful, and poured a glass of my red hibiscus tea (in a light blue glass so that it appeared even darker red)!

Unfortunately my camera can't capture the brilliance, but it was fabulous. I cheesily savored every tongue-searing, sweetly acidic bite. A poor substitute for a nice bottle of O negative, but still good.