Stewed Plums / Plum Butter in the Crockpot

Yesterday was co-op day.  The food co-op that is.  What a great day.  I ended up with extra items since one of our members couldn't make it for pickup.  The others did not want the "stuff" so I brought home the extras.  One of the things I ended up with was an entire carton of black plums.  The box said 28 lbs.  Twenty-eight pounds of plums???  What was I supposed to do with that?

We ate some of them, but still had tons.  I searched for easy crockpot plum butter or something similar.  After looking at multiple recipes I chose the easiest one I found.  (Had lots of other things to do today...)  I ended up with this:

8 lbs of plums (before removing the pits)
1 cup white sugar
about 3/4 cup brown sugar (this was my edition)

I peeled the plums and removed the pits.  I sliced the plums and added the sugar and placed them in the crockpot.  I cooked on high for about 8 hours.  After a good while it still had lots of liquid.  I put a wooden spoon across the top to vent the crockpot.  This helped the evaporation some.  I stirred the mixture every so often (when I remembered) throughout the day.  After turning off, some more of the liquid seemed to evaporate.

I ended up leaving them in chunks.  I thought about putting them in the food processer and blend them up, but I opted to leave as is.  They are very tart.  I ended up serving them on vanilla ice cream and the sweetness of the ice cream helped to balance the tartness ~ but oh boy ~ they are still pretty tart.

I still have about 1/3 of the box.  What will I do with them tomorrow???

A great way to use Yogurt that is close to expiration

My kids love go-gurts.  You know the stuff that comes in a tube that is meant for lunchboxes.  I buy them and freeze them and they eat them like popsicles.  I recently was at the store and they had several yogurt cups on clearance since they were close to expiration.  I had coupons which made these free!  I took them home and was informed that the flavor I purchased was not what they liked.  This particular variety had two colors in it, pink on bottom and white on top.  I took the lid off, stirred it well so that it was all pink and stuck a plastic popsicle stick in it.  You know the ones that are designed for the molds so you can make your own popsicles....  I stuck it in the freezer and the next day I ran warm water over the outside of the yogurt cup in order to release it from the cup.  I handed it to my ultra picky kid (who now could not see the label) and told him it was a yogurt pop.  He loved it!