Dinner o' pasties and gorgeous summer salad

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Can I just tell you how glad I was to remember my batch of frozen pasties tonight? VERY. This afternoon, I took the boys swimming for a while which was fun but extremely tiring despite the fact that I was never in water deeper than 3.5 feet. We met a pal and her darling daughter there, and really, it was stunning to witness boys v. girls at play. She was delicate and relatively calm though she does have an impressive set of lungs (you cute girl, you really do), while my children raced through the fountains at warp speed, pretending the bursts were things which must be cut down, razed!, destroyed!. and periodically cruising over to me at which point they would climb/hang/cling on me to beat sixty. I nearly lost my bathing suit more than once. We then went to the bookstore and finally made it home.

Long story short, beyond roasting some beets for a summer salad, I didn't have much in the way of a plan for dinner, and T was obviously not excited about "just a salad" for his meal. Pasties in the freezer. Amen!

Plum jam, community pick hurrah

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I am so excited that my Cheesy Mashed Potato Puffs were just chosen as a community pick on Food52. That is wonderful, and I'm thrilled. Thank you!

I also just made a wonderful new jam that was inspired by memories of happily eating the spiced plum and port jam I made last year (courtesy of a terrific Food52 cook) and the strawberry-rhubarb-orange jam I made just a month or so ago (courtesy of Marisa of Food in Jars). I had a bunch of little red plums and thought I'd try to break free from the self-imposed chains of plum-basil jam; my relative obsession with it remains intact, but this new jam is lovely!!! It's all plum with a bit of orange zest and juice, allspice and cinnamon. The boys declared it delicious, and I must say I agree. It's also extremely pretty because the red skin of these plums was positively glowing before going into the pot and really lent a beautiful hue to the finished product.