Easy Homemade Plum Jam

I love homemade jam. It's sweet, but not too sweet, super fruity, and tangy.

I hate homemade jam. Every recipe I ever see involves special canning equipment that I don't own and sterilization of that equipment. Sounds like too much work!

When I saw a recipe for jam that claimed to take only twenty minutes and used no special equipment, I had to try it. So I rounded up some 99 cent per pound California plums, boiled them down with lots of sugar, took a bite, and was so satisfied. Sweet, tangy, brilliant purplish-red plum jam had arrived in my home and it took less than half an hour.

Even though the Google homepage told me it was the first day of fall just a few days ago, summer fruits are still available in Southern California grocery stores, so go buy yourself a few pounds of California plums and make some jam. The recipe yields about five cups, so you theoretically should be able to enjoy it for a while, unless you gobble it all up right away like we did! Here's the recipe...

Easy Homemade Plum Jam (similar to and inspired by the recipe found in the Sept 2015 issue of Martha Stewart Living)

1. Wash and remove pits from three pounds of ripe plums. Leave skin on to get a tart flavor, red color, and piecey texture to your jam. Chop into 1 inch chunks.
2. In a large pot, stir fruit with 1.5 pounds of sugar. Bring to a boil. (Trust me, even though there's no liquid in the pot, there will be soon and it will boil.) Add two tablespoons of lemon or lime juice.
3. Stir the pot while it boils until the mixture becomes very viscous. About ten minutes. The bubbles will slow and the mixture will fall of your spoon in clumps. (My plums weren't very ripe, so I also took an immersion blender to the mixture at this point to break it all up.)
4. That's it, that's jam! Now pour it into containers leaving a little bit of space to allow for it to expand while freezing. It can be refrigerated for a month or stored in the freezer for about a year. I recommend eating it on crackers with a slice of sharp cheddar cheese. Yum!