As summer winds down in France (sniff, sniff...), I spent one of the last weeks of August in the countryside. While the French were savoring the last few days of their vacation, I was working...albeit in some rather pleasant surroundings.

I spent the time away from Paris concentrating on finishing up some writing projects, editing, goofing around a bit, antiquing, and scored a big bag of stuff for less than €10, which included a handful of vintage silverware, a Le Creuset orange poêlon (small covered saucepan), and two kind of odd small ceramic bowls, one with a lobster and the other with an elongated fish, on the side.

I also spent the other part of that week, the part not in front of my computer, drinking coffee, in a jam. As in, I tried to fix someone's Reine Claude jam that had way too much sugar in it and didn't jell. I tried adding some lemon juice and boiling it with some green, underripe apples, hoping I could coax some of the pectin to jell it. But it was a stubborn as I was.

I kept going and unlike me, it was stubbornly super-sweet. I then added a handful of fresh ginger shreds, more lemon juice – and finally headed to the hypermarché and picked up a box of pectin in frustration (which I'd never used before) and got it to set.

(I did read up on making your own pectin, which I could have done with all those green apples still on the tree. But I am eyeing them to make apple jelly, once they are ripe.)

I was extremely fortunate to find that the wild plum trees that I had discovered a few years ago, which sadly were trimmed within an inch of their life last year (and yielded zero fruits), had sprung back and I pulled as many plums as I could from the tree. After spending the afternoon pitting, then cooking most of them into jam, I reserved a few to make an impromptu wild plum tart.

I made a rustic wild plum tart by mixing a little more than 1 cup (about 150g) of flour with a sprinkle of salt and a soupspoon of sugar, then cutting in 4 ounces (115g) of cold butter until it was in small pieces, and adding a bit of ice water, mixing it just until it held together. I formed it into a disk, wrapped it up, and chilled it for 30 minutes then rolled it out in the only pan I could find. Before adding the plums, I crumbled some leftover gingersnaps over the bottom - both to add flavor, and absorb any extra plum juices that would make the bottom of the crust soggy.

After plucking out the pits from a colander-full of wild plums, I tossed the colorful beauties in sugar, and tucked them inside, brushing melted butter on the crust, sprinkling it with coarse sugar, and baking it until the plums were cooked and the crust was golden-brown. Vanilla ice cream alongside? You betcha. Or as they say in France...bien sûr!

And since I'm an over-achiever in the jam department (although I think my super-patient editor in the states would rather I be an over-achiever in the editing department), we spent four hours picking itty-bitty elderberries from the tree, which ended up a few hours later as two small jars of highly coveted jam.

Which I'm going to put in a locked safe, and file them under the "Too Good to Use" category.

-David

Just a quick note that I was surprised to see my next book is already listed on Amazon, slated to be released next spring.

Yikes! I'd better go finish it…