This past weekend I had a hankering for fruit leather. I had a lot of plums on hand, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. First, I washed them, cut them in half and pitted them. 

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and bake them for 20 minutes. They should come out looking a little carmelized on top like this:

Next, you’ll need to puree them. This can be done if you have a good blender, or if you have a food processor. We have The Ninja, which I absolutely love. (Makes awesome baby food, too!)

Since my plums were quite tart and not quite ripe I added about 1/2 cup of sugar for the whole lot (which was about 3lbs of plums)

Then puree it up until it has a very smooth gloopy consistency. You’ll need to be able to spread it quite thin, so make sure everything is blended well and there are no big chunks of fruit.

Btw, at this point, you should taste it to make sure it isn’t too tart, if you don’t want it to be. Totally up to you how much or how little sugar you add, I wanted them to be a bit sweet, but 1/2 cup was plenty for this batch! Then take parchment paper and line your baking pan with it and make a THIN layer of puree onto the parchment paper.

I cannot stress enough that it needs to be thin. Mine ended up too thick in the middle and it ended up being a bit gooshy in the middle bit, still tasty, but quite a bit more messy while snacking on! Put your oven on it’s lowest setting. Mine has a “Warm” setting, and that works splendidly. If your lowest setting is 200 or above, stick a wooden spoon in the oven door to keep it slightly open- you don’t want to bake it, you want to dry it out, so if it gets too hot it will turn quite hard and crispy.

Bake for 6-8 hrs, or as long as it takes until it’s no longer tacky to the touch. My first batch was WAY too thick and ended up dehydrating overnight to get leathery! As long as it’s not baking or getting crispy, it’s ok to let it sit in there for quite a while.

If you can pull up the corner like this, you’re good to go. It should peel off of the parchment paper quite easily. I left it on the parchment paper for storing it, so it wouldn’t stick together.

I used a pizza cutter to cut it into strips, pressing firmly enough to cut through the parchment paper as well, so I could use it for storing. If you are concerned with your pans (Mine are old and gross, so no worries there) you can transfer it to a cutting board and do it on there.

Then, I rolled them up and put them in a Tupperware to avoid them getting stale, since I made a pretty big batch and I’m not sure how long it’ll take us to go through it all!

A pretty tasty snack, and WAY cheaper than buying fruit leather at 50 cents each!

Enjoy!

Since we have embarked upon our weight loss journey(Paul is biking and I am doing Jillian Michael’s workouts- whew)  I’ve been making more of an effort to cook healthy meals, ones that include a lot of veggies. It’s so much more fun to cook with lots of colors, don’t you think? I also want Sam to get accustomed to eating lots of different foods and not be as picky of an eater as I am!

A few snap shots of our kitchen over the last little while:

I love having a farmers market that has such good fresh fruits and vegetables. And my mother in law, Gloria’s neighbor who also shared her gardens bounty with us (squash, zucchini, cucumbers, corn on the cob, cabbage, green beans, etc! SO GOOD!)

I bought a large bunch of mint at the Farmer’s Market this weekend, and wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. I’d love to make it into mojito’s, but until September hard alcohol is off the table… So, I decided to make mint syrup so that I can add it to my water (mmm tasty!) or save it and use it for mojito’s later on. And, it’s your lucky day, cuz I am going to show you how to make it!

What you’ll need:
1 bunch fresh mint (about two cups of leaves)
2 cups white sugar
2 cups water

Pluck all those beautiful leaves and get two cups of water boiling with two cups of sugar stirred in.

Once the water is boiling then stuff all of your leaves into the boiling water. Let it simmer for about 5 minutes then remove from heat.

It’ll start to look all wilty and slimy, but should start to smell good and minty. Let it steep for about an hour. I left mine in there for like two hours, because I forgot about it…

Then strain out the minty leaves and you’ve got yourself some delicious mint syrup. A note about this step, my strainer wasn’t quite fine enough to get all of the little bits of leaf out, so after I strained it I let it go through a coffee filter just to get all of the little floaty bits out.

Voila!