Aloka's Adventures: Happy Thanksgiving, and blissful Autumn!

It's so dang beautiful here in the fall!! It's been warm, sunny, and there's a crisp in the air as they say. The crunchy leaves are beautiful shades of golden, red and orange. I went on a walk during lunch last week, and just right off of Baker Street (the main drag) there was a tantalizing hazelnut tree dropping hazelnuts all over the sidewalk. I crunched through the golden leaves looking at the abundant harvest on the ground.

And speaking of abundant harvest, we had a wonderful Thanksgiving up at Naomi's house with Richard, his daughters and ex-wife Naomi and her boyfriend Ralph. Aloka had so much fun with the girls, I hardly saw her for the first two hours we were there I think.

Here is a video of the feast we contributed. My roomate Andrea is also in this video preparing her own feast that she brought to a potluck as well. We love Andrea, and she is so amazing with Aloka too which is a bonus!

This photo below is of a bunch of Philo Tartlett shells I filled with two different kinds of pudding. Dark chocolate pudding, and a Hazelnut Gianduja pudding. I topped them with vanilla laced fresh whip cream and grated chocolate (respective to the flavour it was on) once we were at Naomi's. They were so addictive!

And speaking of fall harvest.... We have an enormous plum tree in our backyard. The funny thing though, is that while everyone else's plums were in full harvest season a couple weeks ago, these ones were yucky, bitter, sour and astringent. They were falling off the tree like crazy, but just tasted gross!

I had pretty much given up on them, as plum season is now coming to a close, but Andrea had a friend come over and tell us that sometimes plums just need a good chill before they become sweet. We tasted them again, and sure enough they are decadent!!
You can imagine the scene that followed! Andrea and I have now each made 10 jars of plum jam, and that was even before the massive harvest we had today!

Today, Josh came over and we pulled the tarp off of Aloka's sandbox and positioned it just right. Then Josh grabbed a branch and shook it a little and down pelted zillions of plums!
All and all we ended up with close to 50 liters of plums, just over 15 gallons!

Josh also helped me hook up the freezer in my basement and tomorrow I'm going to be pitting a whole lot of plums! I'm going to make another 20 jars of jam, some pies to freeze, some plum syrup, and I will freeze a bunch of chopped up plums for use on porridge and whatever else. Josh is going to dry about 5 litres in his dehydrator for me too.

I sent him home with about 7 litres of his own plums, 3 jars of jam AND and whole bunch of hazelnuts off our hazelnut tree! It makes complete sense to have Thanksgiving during the harvest time of year. I love autumn!

Below are the pictures and videos of our giant plum harvest. Here is the plum tree; Giant, un-pruned and pretty much ignored from an arbourists viewpoint: