Cooking Local

Picking plums the narrowboat way

It seems to have become a “tradition” on these boat trips that “the guys” cook at least one meal. With some trepidation, John joined me on a shopping expedition and we bought some local pork, as well as some nice vegetables. Oh, and a bottle of wine of course. Our plan was to serve a nice roast pork with a glaze of mustard and maple syrup and some vegetables to accompany it.

Then along came Beeston Stone Lock. Regis drove into the lock and we waited while Shelly and John worked the lock. After a few minutes of waiting casually for the lock to fill, Shelly discovered that we were sitting under a plum tree, and she started reaching for branches to shake some plums down. Obviously, other narrowboaters had already picked the ones you could easily reach. After sampling one, she started searching the ground for more. The branches at the top of the tree were blue with plums, but it was impossible to reach them. Watching her try to reach the plums, I realized that as the boat came up in the lock I could use the barge pole to reach the top of the tree, so as Regis held the boat in the lock I climbed onto the roof and started hitting branches as high as the pole would allow me to reach. Shelly, still foraging under the tree was not aware of my plan until nice ripe plums started raining down on her. She ended up getting a good-sized bowl of nice purple plums.

Making Jam

Looking at the bowl of plums sitting on the table in the boat, I decided to take advantage of them and switched the recipe to a delicious plum glaze for the pork. I took the plums and boiled them down into a quite delicious plum jam. Instead of mustard we will try a plum jam glaze for the pork. And we ended up having plum jam for breakfast for the rest of the trip.

Hopefully “the girls” will enjoy our nice local cooking.