Money Crashers: 3 Home Phone Landline Alternatives That Save You Money

Based on the stuff I read online, I had the impression that Brian and I were practically the only people left in America who still had a landline phone. Turns out, that's a bit of an exaggeration. According to the National Health Interview Survey, we're in the minority, but it's still a pretty good-sized minority: about 45 percent of adults and 35 percent of kids in the country have a landline phone at home. But that's still a big drop from the 85 percent of all households that had one as recently as 2007.

So are we behind the times? Is the day of the landline over? Or does this old-school technology still serve a useful purpose?

For us, we've concluded, the answer is yes. Unlike most of our friends, we still rely on our landline as our primary phone and use our cell phones only for emergencies. This enables us to get by with only the barest-bones of mobile plans: $10 a month for my still fairly new smartphone, and $3 a month for Brian's dumb phone. Add $36 a month for our landline, and we're paying a total of $49 a month for phone service. If we had to rely on our cell phones as our primary phones, we'd need to upgrade to unlimited talk-and-text plans, which would cost about $15 a month for him and $20 for me. So we'd save around $14 a month, which sounds good...but there are some big downsides. For one, we'd have to keep our cell phones switched on all the time and actually check them every time they ring (rather than ignoring them while we're at home, because everyone who actually knows us knows to try the landline first). We wouldn't be able to share a phone call by using two extensions. If my phone rang upstairs while I was downstairs, I'd have to run up and grab it instead of just picking up the downstairs extension. And worst of all, we'd have to give out our cell phone numbers to everyone who requested our number. Not only would this open us up to even more robocalls than we get now, it would expose all our accounts to the risk of SIM hacking—a scam in which hackers get hold of your cell number, switch it over to a new phone that they control, and instantly gain access to every account for which you've used a phone number for verification. So, yeah, we're willing to pay an extra $14 a month to avoid that nightmare.

Now, there are other alternatives that we've looked into from time to time. For instance, with a device like MagicJack or Ooma, or a cheap VOIP service like VoIPLy, we could reduce our bill to just a few bucks a month. But every time I've grown frustrated enough with our current provider to look into this, I end up backing down because of worries about voice quality and reliability. Since our landline is our main phone, I want to make sure calls we make on it will come through loud and clear.

However, just because keeping the landline is the right decision for us doesn't mean it is for you. If you're on the fence about dropping your landline, my new Money Crashers article can help. It goes into the three main alternatives to landlines—going mobile-only, VOIP, and ATA devices like the MagicJack—and weighs their pros and cons. This can help you figure out what will work best for you in terms of cost, call quality, and convenience.

3 Home Phone Landline Alternatives That Save You Money 

Cow-free cheese experiments, part 2: Homemade vegan mozzarella

As part of our ongoing effort to reduce our dairy consumption, Brian and I have been experimenting for several months with vegan alternatives to cheese. We discovered that straight-up nutritional yeast, or a mixture of nutritional yeast and salt, makes a very decent alternative to parmesan, and that replacing the Monterey Jack in a burrito with sliced avocado makes an equally agreeable variation in flavor and texture. But the cheese we use most is mozzarella, and we had a lot of trouble finding a decent substitute for that. Of the two non-dairy substitutes we found at Trader Joe's, one had almost no flavor, and the other had a flavor and texture that both of us found disgusting. It seemed like if we wanted a decent mozzarella substitute, we'd have to make it ourselves.

I found a recipe on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken that billed itself as "The Best Vegan Mozzarella," and if the chef's description was to be believed, it deserved the title. According to her claims, not only were the flavor and texture just like real mozzarella, it would also melt like the real thing, something most vegan substitutes had stubbornly failed to do. The process was simple: just mix everything in a blender, pour it into a mold, and chill until set. And most of the ingredients were things we could easily pick up at the supermarket.

The only weird ingredient in this recipe was kappa carageenan, a seaweed-based powder that's apparently the key to its successful melting. Some people claim that carageenan causes inflammation of the digestive tract, but according to the nutritionist in Scientific American, "the vast majority of individuals" can tolerate it just fine. For those who happen to be sensitive to it, there's an alternative version of the recipe that uses agar-agar, but this version isn't as easy to make and doesn't melt as well. Since neither Brian nor I have any reason to think we're carageenan-sensitive, and since we wanted our cheese to melt as well as possible, we decided to go with the carageenan form of the recipe.

Hunting down this ingredient proved a bit difficult. They didn't carry it at the Whole Earth Center, nor at any of the supermarkets where we shop. I ended up having to order some online from Walmart (which I'm no longer boycotting) for $8. The other ingredient we had a little trouble finding was tapioca starch; our local supermarket regularly carries this at Passover, but not, it turns out, at other times. So we had to go to Shop-Rite and pick up a bag of the pricey Bob's Red Mill stuff for $3.29. This will be good for several batches, and next year we can stock up on the cheaper stuff when Passover rolls around.

The rest of the ingredients were easily available. We already had some refined coconut oil in the pantry thanks to a lucky find on Freecycle in June, and nutritional yeast and garlic powder in the spice cupboard. We picked up a pound of silken tofu at H-Mart and a jar of sauerkraut—the secret ingredient for giving the cheese its fermented flavor—at Aldi, and we were ready to cook.

After a little initial confusion sorting out the instructions for the agar-agar version from those for the carageenan version of the recipe, this proved to be just as easy to make as the author claimed. We just put all the ingredients in the blender, in order, finishing up with the boiling water, and blended it until it was completely smooth.

Then we poured it into one of our bread pans...

...and chilled it for about an hour. The finished product wasn't quite as firm as a real block of mozarella, but it sliced and grated just like the real thing.

We each tasted one of the shreds and found that its flavor was, to all intents and purposes, identical to real mozzarella. The texture, again, was perhaps a little softer, but much better than any other substitute we'd tried.

We stirred a cupful of this into a batch of Pasta a la Caprese and found that it didn't melt as easily as real mozzarella in this recipe. Normally, when you stir the cheese into the hot pasta, it melts immediately, and you get strings of molten cheese blending in with the pasta and the fresh tomato sauce. In this case, the shreds stayed more or less intact and melted only slightly. But Brian thought this was an improvement in some ways, since it made the cheese easier to distribute evenly throughout the pot of pasta. The texture wasn't quite as exquisite with mostly-solid shreds of cheese instead of strings of melted cheese, but the flavor left us nothing to complain about.

We both had some more of this pasta for lunch the next day. Brian ate his cold, and he reported that when consumed this way, the vegan version was actually superior to the original. As he put it, the non-melted cheese stayed separate from the sauce, instead of "turning into a goo." As for me, I reheated mine in the microwave and discovered that, after a minute on high, the fake cheese actually did melt; apparently, it just needed a little more heat than it could get from merely being sprinkled on hot pasta. Melted, it was actually quite a bit more molten and oozy than real cheese; it doesn't have the same stretchiness, so it just turns into a liquid rather than a stretchy semi-solid. But this experience gave me high hopes that the other half of the cheese we'd made would melt properly on a pizza, unlike the substitutes we'd tried before.

We tried this experiment last night, and sure enough, it worked. Here's how the pizza looked fresh out of the oven. As you can see, the faux-zarella didn't brown like real mozzarella, but it melted just fine, covering the entire surface. The only problem with it was that, once again, it was a little more liquid than the real thing, so it had a tendency to slide off the pizza a bit. But once we'd let it cool, it was pretty much indistinguishable.

Here's how the leftover pizza looked this afternoon, after a whole night in the fridge. Cooled, the faux-zarella didn't hold its shape as well as real mozzarella—probably due, once again, to its lack of stretchiness. Instead of staying stretched over the surface of the pie, it contracted as it cooled, leaving patches of the crust uncovered. But the texture of the cooled cheese was not off-putting, and the taste, as before, was fine. We've certainly had pizzas made with real cheese that weren't nearly as good.

We have one more experiment left to make with this cheese; Brian whipped up another batch of it just to make sure we had enough for the pizza, and he has stuck the rest of it in the freezer to see if it can be frozen for later use like real cheese. If it can, that will make this stuff even more useful to us. But even if it can't, it's a much better substitute for mozzarella than anything we've found before, and should work in just about any recipe that calls for it.

Although we plan to keep using this stuff regardless of the cost, I decided to calculate it anyway, just to see how it compares to the alternatives. The ingredients are:

• 1/2 cup soft or silken tofu. A pound of silken tofu costs $1 at H-Mart, and 1/2 cup is about a quarter of it. So, in theory, it costs only $0.25. However, unless it turns out to be possible to make this cheese in bulk and freeze it, we'll have to buy $1 worth of tofu every time we want to make just one batch of cheese, so we might as well call the cost of this ingredient a dollar. (We'll also need to figure out some more recipes that use silken tofu so none of it will go to waste.)
• 1/4 cup tapioca starch. We paid $3.29 for a bag that claims to contain 15 1/4-cup servings, so that's another 22 cents.
• 1/4 cup refined coconut oil, melted. We got this as a freebie, but it costs about $6 for a 14-ounce jar at Target (it's more expensive than the unrefined stuff we get for $4 a jar at Aldi). The jar contains 27 tablespoons, so a quarter-cup is 89 cents.
• 2 tablespoons nutritional yeast. We got this from the bulk bins at the Whole Earth Center, but neglected to write down the price. I recently checked the price at the George Street Co-Op and it was $11 a pound, which Brian is sure is more expensive, so at a guess, we'll say it was $9 a pound. A 5-ounce bag from Bob's Red Mill contains 9 1/4-cup servings, or 36 tablespoons, so that's about 115 tablespoons per pound, making it another 16 cents for two tablespoons.
• 1 1/2 tablespoons kappa carrageenan. I bought a 2-ounce bag on Walmart.com for $7.95, with free shipping. It contains a mere 16 teaspoons so 1 1/2 tablespoons (4.5 teaspoons) is a little more than a quarter of the bag. That makes this the priciest ingredient, at $2.24. But if we start making this stuff on a regular basis, I can start buying the kappa carageenan in a larger package and cut the price to about $1.41.
• 1 tablespoon sauerkraut. We bought a 24-ounce jar, which contains eight 1/2-cup servings, for $1.69 at Aldi. That makes the cost of one tablespoon less than 3 cents. Of course, like the tofu, a jar this size will give us a lot left over, but it should keep for a good while.
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. I've previously estimated that this costs a penny or less, so call it 1 cent.
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder. We also buy this in bulk at Whole Earth, but we haven't checked the cost. Since we used so little of it, I'm going to say that this costs 1 cent as well.
• 1 1/2 cups boiling water. Essentially free.

Add that all together, and you get a cost of $4.56 per batch. A batch makes two cups of shredded cheese, which is the equivalent of about half a pound of real mozzarella. So this works out to about $9.12 per pound. That's a lot more than real mozzarella, but it's less than Daiya ($11.50 a pound), the only other vegan mozzarella we've found that was anywhere close to acceptable, and it works a lot better. With a cheaper source of kappa carageenan, it would be still cheaper: about $3.73 per batch, or $7.46 per pound. That's barely more expensive than the two alternatives we tried from Trader Joe's, which were both flat-out awful.

Our success with this homemade vegan cheese has made me wonder if perhaps we can cook up acceptable vegan alternatives to some of the other animal products we haven't found good replacements for yet. For instance, we've never found a good veggie version of Polish-style sausage, so when we (regretfully) quit buying kielbasa at the Amish market, we figured we'd just have to give  up this treat entirely. But maybe something like this vegan sausage recipe would allow us to enjoy grilled sausages once more. Or maybe these homemade vegan seitan tenders would work in our favorite chicken and rhubarb recipe where commercial chicken substitutes—usually sold in the form of breaded nuggets or patties—would not. Anything is possible!

We be jammin

We did it! We made our first batch of jam from our very own plums!

Well, when I say "we," I really mean that it was Brian who did most of the actual work. I was more involved in the planning stages: finding a simple-looking recipe and locating canning jars and pectin at the store. But Brian handled the actual processing of the plums and the jars, while I read Ngaio Marsh to him. And it worked! Mostly.

The first snag we ran into was finding canning supplies at the store. The Shop-Rite in Edison carries canning jars, including the little half-pint ones we wanted, so we figured surely it would have pectin also. But it didn't, exactly. Instead, it had two canning products that contained pectin plus some other stuff: Sure Jell, a mixture of dextrose, citric acid, and pectin, and Certo, a liquid product that contains "water, fruit pectin, lactic acid and citric acid (assist gel), potassium citrate (controls acidity), sodium benzoate (preservative)." This was a problem, because our recipe did not call for Sure Jell or Certo; it called for straight-up pectin. We weren't which of these products would work better, or how much of it we'd need to substitute for the one tablespoon of pectin in the recipe. We ended up choosing the Sure Jell on the theory that it was closer to plain pectin, and figuring we'd check the directions on the package and work from there.

Well, when we looked inside the package, it had its own recipe for plum jam, which used one packet of the Sure Jell for about the same volume of plums we were using—but with a whole lot more sugar. Kenji Lopez-Alt's recipe called for a pound and a half of sugar (3 and 3/8 cups) to 4 pounds of plums; Sure Jell's recipe called for 8 cups, more than twice as much. It also didn't say anything about adding lemon juice for added acidity, perhaps because the citric acid in the Sure Jell was sufficient for the purpose. So we decided we'd try it with the smaller amount of sugar, the full packet of Sure-Jell, and no added lemon juice, and hope for the best.

So, with some trepidation, Brian set about preparing the jam. On Monday, he chopped up and macerated the plums and let them steep overnight with the sugar, as Lopez-Alt recommended; on Tuesday, he boiled eight of our new jars to sterilize them, then started cooking the plum mixture. We skipped the milling step, since the plums, after having sat all night in the sugar, were pretty much reduced to liquid already; in fact, they were probably a bit less chunky than we wanted, but that was most likely because Brian had cut them up into smaller pieces than the recipe recommended. Then he began carefully ladling out the jam into the jars, leaving about a quarter-inch of head room at the top of each. This was a ticklish process, and there was a little bit of spillage, but not too much. (Lopez-Alt says he finds a plastic deli container the best tool for scooping the jam from the pot into the jars, but I don't see how you're supposed to be able to sterilize something made of soft plastic, and what's the point of using sterile jars if you're transferring the jam in a non-sterile scoop?) He put on the lids, added the rings, and turned them until they were just finger-tight.

Then, with even more trepidation, he began the actual canning process. A quick test had shown us that canning the jars in our mini pressure cooker wouldn't work, because even these small jars were tall enough to reach the fill line; if he'd put a rack underneath them, they would have been over the line and wouldn't submerge completely. So instead, he put his homemade canning rack in our big stock pot, heated up the water, and began heating the jars. Since they were so small, he was actually able to fit all eight of them in at once. He cooked them at a full boil for ten minutes, as the Sure Jell insert instructed, and then carefully removed them with his rubber-band-wrapped tongs and set them aside to cool.

We then settled down to a game of Scrabble, and as we played, we occasionally heard the gentle pop of one of the canning jars sealing—something we'd never actually managed to achieve with the larger jars. And when we checked the fully cooled jars in the morning, we found that all eight lids were securely in place, with no give in them when pressed. Brian tested them more carefully that evening by tugging gently on each lid, and when they stayed sealed, he put the rings back on and stowed them away in the basement. (The recipe says it's better to store them with the rings off, so you can see if one of the jars has lost its seal, but we didn't want to risk dislodging a lid by accident. We figure we can always check the lids again before opening them.)

There was one thing about our first batch of homemade jam that Brian found a little disconcerting; it didn't seem to have set up very well. When he tilted the jars, he could see the jam sloshing slightly inside, instead of staying put the way preserves from the store do. This is most likely because our recipe contained so little sugar. Lopez-Alt actually notes in his recipe that, since sugar aids jelling, it's best to add "a secondary jelling agent that works even without sugar," such as calcium; he recommended Pomona's Universal Pectin, which comes with a separate packet of calcium that you can mix with water and stir in when you cook the plums. But we couldn't get that stuff, so we had to work with what we had. As it turns out, the jam seems to have set up a bit more in the past few days, so now it only sort of oozes slowly when you tilt the jar. No big deal; it'll just make the jam easier to spread.

So, all in all, I would have to say this was our first successful attempt at canning. We're still going to try to eat as many of our plums as possible in their fresh, natural state, but if they're starting to go off faster than we can eat them, we'll be able to make another batch of jam with more confidence than the first. (Brian even unearthed an old packet of pectin that was hidden in the back of the pantry, so maybe next time we'll try that and see if it works better.)

Recipe of the Month: Black bean pasties

Last night, Brian's Plan A for dinner—roll-your-own sushi—fell through when he discovered that the sushi-grade salmon at H-Mart no longer comes with wasabi and pickled ginger. (You could buy these condiments separately, but for something like four bucks apiece, which would have made our homemade sushi meal nearly as expensive as getting it in a restaurant.) So, left at loose ends, he started experimenting with the odds and ends we had in the pantry and fridge: a red onion, one soggy carrot, some celery, a can of black beans. And what he decided to make out of this motley assortment was...pies.

This recipe was, I think, inspired partly by a disappointing experience we'd had a month or so ago. We went out to a new Venezuelan restaurant that's just opened in town, where the menu centers on a sandwich-like dish called arepas. These are little flat patties made of cornmeal, cooked on a griddle like crumpets, and then split and stuffed with a variety of fillings, like shredded cooked chicken or pork. I ordered a black bean arepa, practically the only vegetarian option on the menu, and found it insanely bland. The arepa wrapper itself was actually pretty nice, sort of crispy, but the filling honestly tasted like the chef had just opened up a can of black beans, heated them up without adding any seasoning whatever, and stuffed them into the dough. I couldn't even finish it.

So I guess Brian had been toying in the back of his mind with the idea of what he would have done to make a more flavorful black bean filling, because he cooked up a mixture that swung way over to the other extreme. He chopped up the carrot, a stalk of celery, and a quarter of a red onion, sautéed them in a tablespoon of olive oil, dumped in the can of black beans liquid and all, and simmered it for ten minutes. Then he stirred in a whopping half a tablespoon of Penzey's Northwoods Seasoning, which we received a jar of as a stocking stuffer last Christmas, plus half a tablespoon of nutritional yeast, and continued to simmer the mixture until it was reduced to a refried-bean sort of consistency.

For the dough, he mixed up a sort of biscuit dough—a cup and a half of flour, a half teaspoon of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder, a tablespoon of olive oil, and about half a cup of water—and then, in his own words, "brutally mistreated it." Normally, you work biscuit dough as little as possible, so it comes out nice and light. But he kneaded this stuff as if it were bread dough for a good ten minutes, then broke it up into eight balls which he let sit for ten minutes and then rolled out into circles about seven inches in diameter. He topped four of these circles with the bean mixture, moistened the edges, added another circle on top, and then sealed, rolled, and crimped the edges to make little hand pies. He then baked these for 20 minutes in a 450° oven, using a silicone baking mat underneath so they wouldn't stick to the pan.

The result was...well, certainly not bland. In fact, I'd say it was a bit too well-seasoned. The Northwoods seasoning, made from salt, paprika, black pepper, thyme, rosemary, garlic, and chipotle, packs quite a punch, and the amount he'd added to the beans made the mixture rather fiery and extremely potent. The outer crust also posed a bit of a problem, because the heavily worked biscuit dough came out not just crisp but hard—so hard that I couldn't manage to cut mine with a table knife. I had to break pieces off the edge of the crust and eat my way through those before I could get to the filling. If I'd been able to distribute the spicy filling more evenly across the mass of crust, I think it would have tamed the heavy seasoning a bit.

So the bad news is, this recipe isn't really ideal in its present form. But the good news is, I don't think it would take that much tinkering to make it work. I knew the basic idea of seasoned black beans in a crust was a sound one, because I'd had had black bean empanadas before that were quite tasty, so I looked up empanadas in Mark Bittman and found that the main difference between his dough and Brian's is that he uses quite a bit more oil—six tablespoons instead of just one to a cup and a half of flour. (He also uses more baking powder, more salt, and a half-cup of cornmeal in addition to the wheat flour.) Making the dough this way, and kneading it for only a minute before forming it into balls, should give us a softer and chewier crust instead of the hard shell these pies had. Bittman also forms his empanadas by putting just a bit of filling in the middle of each dough circle, folding it in half, and crimping it closed. That would eliminate the heavy rolled edge we had on these. And finally, cutting the Northwoods seasoning from one and a half teaspoons down to one, or maybe even three-quarters, would make it much less fiery, but still flavorful.

All in all, I'm inclined to give these bean turnovers another try, but next time make them more like Bittman's bean empanadas. I think with a little tweaking, they could be a decent addition to our vegan dinner repertoire—and one that we'll almost always have the ingredients for on hand.

Money Crashers: 16 Small Purchases That Can Save You Big Money

Several years ago, at an estate sale, I bought up somebody's old sewing kit for the princely sum of a quarter. At the time, I already had a small sewing kit of my own, with a small selection of needles and maybe a dozen spools of different-colored thread, but this was a much more extensive kit. Dozens of spools of thread, each by itself worth at least a couple of bucks; a large pincushion; a good pair of fabric scissors; a collection of miscellaneous buttons; needles, safety pins, and straight pins.

With my modest sewing needs, it was enough to keep me going for years—and it has. I've used it to repair dozens of garments, Brian's as well as my own. Paired with my extremely limited sewing skills, it has extended the life of T-shirts, sweaters, and blue jeans. It has made too-big pants and shorts wearable and even helped me repair our old Roman shades. It was unquestionably the best quarter I ever spent.

This is just an extreme illustration of how sometimes, a small purchase can pay for itself many times over. In my latest Money Crashers article, I offer 15 more examples of how relatively inexpensive items  can save you big money on food costs, home energy use, clothing, electronics, or repeat purchases like bottled water. Most of these "small" purchases discussed  cost quite a bit more than 25 cents, but they're all under $100 and can save you hundreds or even thousands over their lifespan.

16 Small Purchases You Can Make Now to Save Money in the Long Run

Money Crashers: How to Get Less Junk Mail

Here's a little sampling of what we've received in our mailbox this week: a flier from a local gym. An invitation to buy auto insurance. A newsletter from our health insurer. Two letters from an online pharmacy (one for me and one for Brian) telling us we need to enroll in a program we're already enrolled in. Oh, and a couple of pieces of actual mail.

As you can see, the junk mail still outweighs the real mail by a significant margin—but there's less of it than there used to be. Over the years, I've whittled down the pile of junk I used to receive by opting out from various lists: direct mail advertising, preapproved credit offers, catalogues, phone books, unwanted charities. And in my latest Money Crashers article, I explain how you can do the same.

By opting out, you'll save time, reduce paper waste, and lower your risk of identity theft. And you'll be at less risk of losing the few pieces of real mail you actually wanted to receive in amongst all the junk. To learn how, just check out the article.

How to Get Less Junk Mail – 7 Things You Need to Do to Opt Out

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Plumfest

Since I first introduced the idea of Gardeners' Holidays back in 2013, I've celebrated the August holiday under a variety of names. For the first couple of years it was Squashmas, a celebration of zucchini, which reaches its peak in early August (assuming the squash vine borers don't kill your plants before that). But in subsequent years, other crops frequently displaced the zucchini, turning August 1 into a celebration of cherries, tomatoes, or cucumbers. And this year, a new crop is taking center stage: plums.

This is a big change from last year, when a combination of brown rot and the depredations of squirrels left us with virtually no plum crop at all. (I think we may have managed to harvest two Opals.) So we decided to get serious about protecting our plums, developing what I think of as the 3-Point Plum Plan: pruning, spraying, and wrapping the trees with paper coated in Tree Tanglefoot to deter the squirrels.

This plan turned out to be a mixed success. Though Brian diligently sprayed the plums every week with the new Serenade spray we bought, many of them still turned brown, withered, and fell off the trees. However, early in the summer, he ran out of the Serenade spray and, rather than buy more (since it didn't seem to be working all that well anyway), he switched back to the copper fungicide we'd used the year before. And this actually seemed to be a lot more effective. It hadn't worked very well the first time, but that was when Brian was attempting to apply it with an ordinary spray bottle, which couldn't reach most parts of the tree. With our new sprayer, which attaches to the hosepipe, he was able to apply the fungicide much more thoroughly. We were still seeing a few plums rot, but a much larger percentage of them were actually surviving long enough to start ripening.

This, of course, was the point at which the squirrels stepped in. Well before the plums were actually ripe enough to pick, they were scampering up the tree to snatch them. We tried girdling the trunks and the largest branches with strips of paper coated in Tree Tanglefoot, and this apparently did catch them a few times, as we found tufts of grey fur sticking to the strips on more than one occasion. But we couldn't block every single branch this way, so those crafty rodents just found new routes to the plums, leaping over and around our improvised barriers to reach the fruit. Often they would leave the half-eaten carcasses of the unripe plums scattered at the base of the tree, as if to taunt us. We quickly concluded that if we waited for the fruits to ripen fully on the tree, we'd never get to taste any of them.

Now, it is apparently possible to pick plums when they're slightly under-ripe and ripen them indoors. But how under-ripe is "slightly"? Despite diligent searching, I couldn't find any information to tell me just what was the earliest stage at which plums could safely be picked. So Brian decided to figure it out by trial and error. He picked a mixed batch of plums—some from the Opal tree, some from the Mount Royal—and set them downstairs in the laundry room (the coolest room in the house) to see if they would ripen.

The red Opal plums, which had been ripest to start with, obligingly ripened right up over the course of the next week or so. So, eventually, Brian went out and picked all the ones that were left on the tree, about 35 plums in total. Compared to last year's pitiful crop, it was a pretty good haul, and the plums were quite tasty, with sweet-tart, juicy yellow flesh. However, the purple Mount Royal plums from this batch were much less cooperative. They stayed obstinately hard for weeks, then suddenly turned to mush apparently overnight. Clearly, they hadn't been ready for picking.

So, about a week and a half ago, he picked a second batch and stored them in the same way, testing them periodically to see if they were actually ripening. This time, it worked out much better. He tried one Thursday morning and found that, while not quite ripe yet, it was almost there—and definitely riper than it had been when he picked it. So he decided they were ready, and went out and picked all the literally low-hanging fruit off the tree. He went out with our big 6-quart mixing bowl, and came back in with it piled high with plums. And that was only the first installment. He went out again that evening with the stepladder and filled the bowl a second time, and he made another trip out just now and climbed up the tree itself to get all the remaining plums that he could reach—maybe another quart or so.

So all told, we've harvested over 13 quarts of plums from the Mount Royal tree alone, plus the 35 Opals. (The plums on our third tree, a Golden Gage, are still green, so we don't know when we'll be able to pick those.) We've already eaten all the Opals, but if we succeed in ripening up all the Mount Royals, we'll have far more than we can possibly eat fresh. Even in the fridge, they'll only keep for about two weeks, and this is definitely more plums than we can consume in two weeks. If we want to enjoy the fruits of our labors, we're going to need some means of preserving them. And since we don't have a chest freezer or a food dehydrator, that probably means canning.

A quick search led me to this recipe/monograph on "awesome plum jam" on Serious Eats, penned by Kenji Lopez-Alt, who certainly should know what he's talking about. The recipe calls for a food mill, but he says earlier that using it is an optional step if you "like a bit more jamminess to your preserves." So we could make the recipe without one and just have chunkier preserves. (We'd also add what he calls the "optional" step of adding lemon juice to make sure the preserves are acidic enough to combat botulism, because we wouldn't want to take chances with that.)

So we've got a suitable recipe; the problem is the canning process itself. We don't have a pressure canner, and our little pressure cooker is too small to handle more than one jar—and even if we do our jars in a water bath, our biggest pot can only accommodate three quart jars or four pint jars at a time. But the biggest problem is that, every time we've tried it, we haven't actually managed to get the jars to seal. Brian thinks it might work better with small jars rather than big ones, so we'll try that, but that means we won't be able to process as many plums at once. So preserving this volume of plums will be quite a process, most likely requiring us to make and can multiple batches over the course of a single weekend. Watch this space for a future post on how that goes.