Today's efforts

I spent most of today in the kitchen. I didn't mind because it's cold and rainy outside!

First, I fixed the sour cherry jelly, according to the blue book instructions for fixing jelly that didn't set up properly, which I posted previously. This time, it's starting to set up even before the jars are completely cool, which is a good sign! (I fixed 4 cups at a time, so I did 4 batches.)

I also took the not-set cherry pulp spread and put it into the small crockpot and let it cook for several hours, then canned it as cherry butter. (YUM!)

Then, I took the jar of apples soaking in rum, puréed them in the small blender cup, cooked it with some added pectin and sugar, poured it into hot jars and processed them in the steam canner. 

Next, I took the jars of dates and craisins soaking in port wine and did the same thing.

Meanwhile, I ran the dishwasher twice (and I think I'll do it one more time as soon as it's done running), and ran a load of laundry, too. 

I also put one of the "Slow Cooker Aldi Dump Freezer Meals" into the crock pot and it's happily cooking away. Tonight we're having "Caribbean Citrus Chicken", the 2nd-to-last meal left from my January meal assembly session. (We have one more meal after this: Chicken Noodle Soup.)

What is a "Slow Cooker Aldi Dump Freezer Meal"? Well, back in January, I bought an e-book of slow cooker freezer meals because I wanted a low-cost, easy way to make dinner. I was not disappointed. The author has a shopping list and charts that show how to assemble the 20 freezer meals (10 recipes made twice) in a logical manner. She has a number of these e-books, but I chose the "Comfort Food" book, because it seemed to have the most recipes we'd actually eat and enjoy. 

The first time I made them (back in January), I made them strictly according to her recipes (I didn't make her chili recipe because I make Cincinnati chili -- it's the only kind I like!). They're really good and we have enjoyed eating them -- but as we ate them, we decided there were a couple of tweaks we wanted to make to the recipes.

This past Monday, we went to Aldi, shopping list in hand, and bought what we needed to make the meals again -- we didn't need everything, because we had some stuff on hand because I bought extra stuff (such as tomato paste) to have on hand last time I was there. One of the things we changed was that instead of using chicken thighs and legs in a couple of the chicken recipes, we decided to just use boneless, skinless chicken breasts for all the chicken recipes. A bit more expensive (though not by much!), but it's so much less work when you don't have to skin the legs & thighs. Another thing I did this time was eliminate the potatoes -- they're good, but I need to get back to eating more low-carb than I have been lately -- AND I also found Italian sausage with no casings (just bulk ground sausage meat, packaged like ground beef is packaged) which saved SO much time because I didn't have to take the casings off of all the sausages to put the ground meat into the meatloaf and the Sausage Kale Soup! We also changed up the order of assembly a little bit (for example, putting the meat into the containers first, instead of 4th). After we were done, I made a note of all the changes we made so we don't have to re-invent the wheel next time we assemble the meals! 

Back in January when I made these meals, I used one-gallon ziplock bags as the author suggested, but I don't like the waste generated when I use the meals, so between now and then, I bought six of the 4L Cambro round containers with lids. These things: 

They also come as square containers, which I think would save some space in the freezer, but I know that the frozen contents of of the round one will fit perfectly in my large crock pot when the contents are laid down horizontally. (I don't think that's true for the square ones.) Thankfully, we have two upright freezers in the garage, so we've got plenty of room. We've had one of the freezers since we moved to Southern California, and the other one was given to us last year by a lovely lady at our church who was downsizing her possessions after the death of her husband. We use one for "ingredients" (such as chicken broth or tomato sauce) and one for "ready-to-go" meals (such as these).

I only bought six of the 4L containers because that's all I could afford at the time. I used these containers when assembling the meals, and used the one-gallon ziplock bags for the rest of the meals. After we were done, we decided that six of the 4L containers is all we need, and we could replace 10 of the ziplock bags with 2L round containers. (We'll still use the ziplock bags for the meatloaf because the loaves fit better into bags than into these containers.) Based on past experience, I figure I've got a couple of months to get the 2L containers, so I haven't bought them yet. I should go check at the local thrift shops to see if they've got any there....

Anyway, I feel good having gotten so much stuff done today (in addition to a few other things such as contacting tech support to fix a problem on my web store, mutter).

The Slow-Cooker Meat Spaghetti Sauce Recipe

I made my own meat spaghetti sauce one day. It was the result of one of my "let's put in a little of this, a little of that" cooking days and it turned out really well! So I'm posting the recipe here so I won't forget it. :-)

• I put some frozen beef strips into the crock pot along with some frozen homemade chicken broth. Cooked on high until the broth melted.
• Once the broth was liquid, I added -- not all at the same time, but spread out during the day "as the Spirit moved me":
• a few beef bouillon cubes
• a can of tomato paste -- and a can-full of water to clean out the can
• some ketchup -- because I had an almost-empty bottle of it in my fridge. I used a bit of cider vinegar to wash out the bottle, then dumped that into the pot, too.
• A spoonful of Marmite -- I keep a jar of it on hand to add umami to dishes. Could also substitute other good umami sources, depending on what sub-tastes you like: Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, ponzu sauce, dashi, or Vegemite (we can't use Vegemite because Bri is allergic to celery)
• some Italian seasoning
• dried onions
• garlic powder
• salt & pepper
• I let that cook on low for several hours. 
• Later, after the beef was good and tender, I put the beef and some liquid into my food processor and shredded it, then put it back into the pot.
• I made pasta and put about 1/2 cup of finished hot pasta water into the sauce, too

The Generic Mustard Recipe

Here's a really good and useful generic mustard recipe, along with four flavors I've made with it. For the past couple of years, I've made these mustards for my church bell choir's annual bake sale and they are always very popular. It's also easy to make new recipes by following the template of the other recipes.

(One of my church friends said she made deviled eggs with my beer mustard for a St. Patrick's Day party and they were a big hit!)

Generic recipe instructions:

COMBINE First Liquid and Mustard Seeds in a large saucepan. Bring to a rolling boil. Remove from heat, cover, and let stand at room temperature until seeds have absorbed most of the moisture, about 2 hours.

After about 1.5 hours of soaking time, HEAT jars in simmering water until ready for use. Wash lids and bands in warm soapy water and set aside.

TRANSFER approx half of each batch of seeds to blender. Add half to two-thirds of Second Liquid as needed for ease of blending. Process until smooth or at least only slightly grainy. Return mixture to pot. (note: if you want a smooth mustard rather than grainy, blend the entire batch of seeds, rather than just half!)

ADD the rest of Second Liquid and the Remaining Ingredients to pot. Stir to mix. Bring to a boil.

LADLE hot mustard into hot jars leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles. Wipe rim. Center lid on jar. Apply band and adjust until fit is finger tight. Place jar in water bath or steam canner. Repeat until all jars are filled.

PROCESS in water bath or steam canner for 10 minutes, adjusting for altitude. Remove jars and cool. Check lids for seal after 24 hours. Lid should not flex up and down when center is pressed.

For all the following variations, one batch = five 4-oz jars

Plain Mustard

First Liquid: 1.5 cups water

Mustard Seeds: 1 cup (100g)

Second Liquid: 1 cup water

Remaining Ingredients:

* 1/2 cup malt or cider vinegar

* 1 tsp lightly packed brown sugar (or 1/2 tsp honey)

* 1/4 cup dry yellow mustard powder

Beer Mustard

First Liquid: 1.5 cups dark beer (12 fl oz)

Mustard Seeds: 1 cup (100g)

Second Liquid: 1 cup water

Remaining Ingredients:

* 1/2 cup malt or cider vinegar

* 1 tsp lightly packed brown sugar (or 1/2 tsp honey)

* 1/4 cup dry yellow mustard powder

Lemon Curry Mustard

First Liquid: 1.5 cups puréed lemons (approx 3 lemons with tips & seeds removed)

Mustard Seeds: 1 cup (100g)

Second Liquid: 1 cup water

Remaining Ingredients:

* 1/2 cup white vinegar

* 1 tsp lightly packed brown sugar (or 1/2 tsp honey)

* 1/4 cup dry yellow mustard powder

* 3/4 cup curry powder

Sriracha Honey Dijon Mustard

First Liquid: 1.5 cups dry white wine

Mustard Seeds: 1 cup (100g)

Second Liquid: 1 cup water

Remaining Ingredients:

* 1/2 cup white vinegar

* 1 tsp lightly packed brown sugar (or 1/2 tsp honey)

* 1/4 cup dry yellow mustard powder

* 2 tablespoons (1 oz) minced fresh garlic

* 1/4 cup sriracha

Black Garlic - YUM!

I remember the first time I heard of "black garlic". I thought, "What the heck is that?!" Then I saw a picture and thought, "Ewww!" (For those who don't know what black garlic is, here's the Wikipedia article describing it.)

But foodie people were raving about it! The price, however, was outside my budget, especially for something that I wasn't quite so sure of. So, I did a little research to see if it was possible to make it at home cheaply and easily. I found this article about how to make it in a crockpot, and it sounded easy peasy!

I bought a pack of 4 garlic bulbs at the 99¢ Store, followed the directions at that link, and put the garlic into the crockpot and let it cook for 30 days.

After the 30 days, I opened the jars (and had to throw the rings into the scrap metal recycling bin because they were all rusty and yucky -- I of course usually recycle the actual lids, but I usually get to re-use the rings. Not this time!), removed the wet paper towels, transferred the now-blackened bulbs to clean jars with clean lids, and put them into the fridge... where they sat for a few months.

Now that I had this stuff, what was I gonna do with it??

Fast forward to a few days ago, I found a recipe for Garlic Jelly in my Ball Blue Book. I decided to try it with my black garlic rather than the plain old roasted garlic called for in the recipe. I also decided to substitute apple cider vinegar for the generic "vinegar" called for in the recipe. (The recipe specified that the vinegar had to be 5% acidity, which the label of the cider vinegar confirmed it was.)

When I opened the jars of refrigerated black garlic, the smell was heavenly, and when I tore apart the bulbs, it looked gorgeous!

I carefully peeled all the garlic, which was messy (note to self: next time I make black garlic, peel the cloves beforehand!), and put the cloves into the blender cup with 1/2 cup of the vinegar. After blending it all up, the purée was super thick and unpourable, so I put another 1/2 cup of vinegar into the blender to liquify it enough to get it out of the blender cup! I used the remaining 1 cup of vinegar called for in the recipe to "clean" the blender cup.

I followed the rest of the recipe and finally poured it into the canning jars, then processed them. I had a bit left over that didn't wouldn't fill a jar full, so I put it into a non-canning jar & stuck it in the fridge without processing.

While the jars were processing, I used a piece of bread to sop up the jelly from the pan and ...

O.
M.
G.

!!!!!!!!

This is BLACK GOLD! So so good. Brianne gave it a high compliment: "This tastes like something one would get at a very expensive restaurant."

I plan to use this wherever I would normally use balsamic vinegar -- salad dressings, glaze for roast meats, on burgers, with fancy cheeses. IT IS SO GOOD!

I whole-heartedly recommend making black garlic, then turning it into jelly. You will not be disappointed! I can't wait to use this stuff!

ADDENDUM 5/22/19: It's really more of a thick sauce than a jelly, which is fine. Better, actually, because it's pourable (though really thick). 

More cherries!

So yesterday (Fri May 17), I woke up to a flat tire on my truck. Ugh! I called AAA and they came to put the spare tire on, then I had to drive over to America's Tire to get the old tire repaired (it turns out it couldn't be repaired, so they had to replace it -- thankfully, it was under warranty!).

While there, I noticed that they had four sour cherry trees in their parking lot, so after I got my truck into the repair queue, I went out and picked cherries. I got three pounds of them!

"Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" or something, eh? LOL!

Jelly Set Update

So I checked in on the jelly that I put into the fridge (without processing) and compared it with the jelly that I processed and were now sitting in my pantry. Here's a video showing the differences:

In the video, you can see that the jars and other containers I use for stuff in the fridge are not canning jars -- because they go right into the fridge and so don't need to be processed and so don't need to be in canning jars.

Other Preserves I'm Working On

In addition to making jam, jelly, and butter from the free fruit I've gotten this past week or so, I've also got some jars of fruit that have been soaking in the fridge for a few weeks. The 99¢ store had some blemished fruit for a great price and I had some bottles of various liquors that we weren't using (but which were taking up valuable shelf space!), so I cut up the fruit and started them soaking in the liquids in the fridge. Now it's time to reclaim the fridge space!

I've already made some of it into preserves: Dates & Craisins in Moa Breakfast Beer as well as Nectarines in Ginger Ale with Honey.

(Yes, yes, I *know* that ginger ale isn't alcoholic, but I had a few cans of it and neither Bri nor I were drinking it, so I put it to good use.)

I've still got several jars of things in the fridge, so in the upcoming weeks, I'll be making:

• Apples in Honey Mead
• Apples in Rum
• Pears in Port Wine with Rosemary -- I'll need to pick out the rosemary before I blend that one, though, otherwise there will be woody stems in the jam and I don't think I want that. Ooh! I can save the rosemary and use it the next time I make roast pork loin -- that sounds good!
• Dates & Craisins in Port Wine
• Peaches in White Wine with Vanilla

For these, I blend the fruit & liquid in the blender and make jam/preserves/whatever-you-want-to-call-it-(but-it-ain't-jelly). 

Loquats & Mulberries

While the cherry butter was cooking and processing, I started preparing the loquats and mulberries to jam-making.

I had a couple pounds of loquats. I put them into the kitchen sink, washed them, and removed the stems.

Then I used a small paring knife to remove the stem end and the blossom end of each fruit, then cut it lengthwise down the side and removed the seeds. If you've never done anything with loquats, I recommend looking at some YouTube videos about them. They're a stone fruit, but the stone is smooth, AND there are usually multiple stones per fruit. The stones are surrounded by a fibrous sheath that is easy enough to remove. Some people choose to peel the fruit, but I didn't bother with that.

Oh, one more thing: I recommend wearing rubber gloves when working with loquats. They turned my index and thumb fingertips and fingernails brown. Not easy to see in this picture, but it looks like I've been playing in the dirt!

While I was working, I put the pitted fruit into a bowl with water and lemon juice to keep it from browning. I had a little bit of Pinot Grigio wine in the fridge, so I added that, too. 

I now have a nice collection of loquat seeds. I plan to plant some of them in our yard.

I took the handful of mulberries, washed them, and de-stemmed them, then dumped them in with the loquats into the cooking pan. The loquats were pretty sweet all on their own, so I only put in about 1/2 cup of sugar. BTW, that's a whole mulberry in my fingers in that pic below.

After they cooked enough to heat all the way through, I added some pectin and used my immersion blender to blend it all up. It's soooo yellow! LOL

I poured it into hot jars and processed it. Once again, I had a bit more than I had actual canning jars for, so I put some directly into the fridge instead of processing it.

The jars are now cooling -- hopefully I'll get a good set on this batch! 

Cherry update (and a link to 'Liquid Cement')

This morning, I checked the sour cherry jelly jars to see if they had set. They're not set, but the jelly is pretty thick. The jar that I put into the fridge is showing signs of setting. I read recently (but can't find the link now, sigh) that sometimes it can take up to a couple of weeks for a jelly to completely set, so I'm not totally discouraged -- yet. I mean, the worst case scenario is that it's cherry syrup instead of jelly, and that's not so terrible, is it? ;-)

The cherry butter that cooked overnight in the crock pot, however? O. M. G. So, so good! Thick, yummy, cherry goodness!

I turned the crock pot up to high and added a tbsp of pectin. I used the immersion blender to mix it well and then waited for it to come up to a boil. Once there, I poured it into hot jars & processed it. I had a bit left over -- not enough to fill a canning jar -- so I did what I usually do: I poured it into a non-canning container (such as an empty jar from something store-bought like salad dressing or whatever) and stuck it into the fridge. I can't wait to see how it turns out!

PS. I am putting this link here so I don't lose it. It's called "Liquid Cement" and is "the formula for setting up jam or jellies that did not set".

PSS. I was perusing my Ball Blue Book ("Guide to Preserving," 37th edition, ISBN: 0-9728537-4-5, ©2014) and found these instructions on page 69. They're very similar to the "Liquid Cement" above:

Sour cherries

As I said in my previous post, last week we picked about six pounds of sour cherries from decorative trees in our church's parking lot. I don't know what variety they are, but the tree leaves and the fruit are both a dark dark red, almost black.

I divided the cherries up into two batches of three pounds each. I realized I didn't have a cherry pitter, so I googled how to remove the pits without one. There are some interesting ideas out there: some people use a bottle and a chopstick, others use a paperclip, others use a paring knife, and still others just use their fingers. But the one that seemed easiest to me was the suggestion to just remove the stems by hand, then cook the cherries with about 1/4 cup of water, then use a potato masher to smoosh it all up, then a food mill (or chinois/China cap) to separate the pulp from the pits.

So I did all that and then dumped the mush into my food mill (I have a bog-standard Foley food mill with three interchangeable strainer thingies, each with different size holes). OMG I worked up a sweat with that thing! It certainly didn't seem this hard to use the last time I used it (on prickly pear fruit), but I soldiered on and eventually had a bowl of fruit pulp and a pile of pits. *whew*

I dug out my Ball Blue Book and followed the recipe for making and canning Sour Cherry Preserves. 

I don't know what happened, but it did NOT set up, not even the jar I put in the fridge overnight! Mutter.

So the next day, I opened all the jars and re-cooked the jam. I added a bit more pectin and a bit more sugar and let it boil hard for two minutes then poured it into hot jars and processed it.

No joy. The next morning, it was still not set. Sigh. "OK," I thought, "it's not jam; it's syrup! Still yummy. Still usable. No big deal." A couple of days later I noticed that, not only was it NOT set, but the pulp had separated from the juice, creating two distinct layers in each of the jars. Double sigh. So I opened all the jars yet again (such a waste of the lids -- they can't be re-used once they've been sealed onto a jar. At least they can be recycled as scrap metal. Sigh.). 

This time, I strained the juice & pulp through a couple of muslin jelly bags. I was initially planning to discard the pulp, but Bri tasted it and said it'd be a good sandwich spread once it was gelled, so I cooked the juice separately from the pulp and added even more pectin to each batch. I poured them into hot jars & processed them. Those jars are sitting in my pantry now. They're STILL not set, though the pulp is much thicker than the syrup, as one would expect, LOL. 

Meanwhile, I still had three more pounds of cherries to deal with, so I decided to spend the $5.00 and bought a cherry pitter from Amazon. It arrived yesterday and I used it last night and this morning to pit the remaining cherries. Initially I was concerned with how much cherry flesh was expelled with the pits -- I don't want any of that yummy fruity goodness to go to waste! But I learned from my previous experience and had a plan. :-) 

Here's a pic of the pitted cherries:

And here are the pits with some cherry flesh still attached:

I put the pitted cherries into a pan, added a few cups of sugar as well as the last bit of some Honey Mead I had on hand, and started heating them on low heat.

Meanwhile, I put the pits (along with the flesh clinging to them) in another pan and added just enough water to cover. Once they were boiling, I used the potato masher to mush it all up -- it really does work well to separate the pits from the flesh -- then put the resulting slurry through my big mesh sieve, pushing it through with the back of the ladle. (This was MUCH easier than using the food mill!) I put the strained pulp in the pot with the pitted cherries. Then I put the pits into a small bowl and covered them with water, then swished them around to make sure I got all the yummy fruity goodness off of them, then put that water into the pot with the pitted cherries.

I used my immersion blender to blend the cherries all up into a pulp. Initially, I was planning to just make jam, but I decided that I liked the idea of a batch of jelly and a batch of cherry spread. I googled to see if there was such a thing as "cherry butter" and lo, and behold, there is! I found this easy-peasy recipe and decided to modify it a bit for my own situation, so I could make cherry jelly as well as cherry butter.

First, I poured the blended cherry pulp through the big mesh sieve (pictured above). I put all the pulp that ended up in the sieve into the 1.5L slow cooker I got from my mom's estate. Then I lined the sieve with several layers of cheesecloth and passed the strained liquid through them. Again I put the pulp that ended up in the cheesecloth into the slow cooker crock. Then I took that strained liquid and passed it through one of my muslin jelly bags, again putting the pulp into the slow cooker crock. Finally, I passed the liquid through another muslin jelly bag. There wasn't much pulp left in that bag!

I ended up with almost 3L of juice:

and a slow cooker full of pulp:

I used the immersion blender on the pulp again to make it nice and smooth, then cooked the pulp on high for a few hours, with the lid propped up with bamboo skewers -- because I want the crock covered, but need to let the liquid evaporate:

I'll leave it to cook on low overnight and hopefully tomorrow it'll be full of yummy cherry butter goodness!

Meanwhile, I poured the cherry juice into a big shallow pan and added a bit more sugar, as well as some pectin. While adding the pectin, I emptied the jar I had, so I opened up the new one I bought yesterday. I noticed that the new pectin was almost white, while the old pectin was more off-white. 

Hmm, could the reason the first batch didn't set be because the pectin was old??!!

I cooked the juice on low for a while. While it was heating up, I put some clean jars into the canner and let it heat up, too, so they'd be ready when I needed them.

Once the juice started steaming and bubbling, I put a bit of the juice onto a chilled glass plate (I put the bare plate into the freezer when I started cooking the juice) and then put it back into the freezer for two minutes. When the timer went off, I found the juice on the plate had gelled nicely. Yay! I turned the burner to high and brought the juice to a hard rolling boil that wouldn't stir down (it took a few minutes to get to that point). I set the timer for one minute and kept stirring. 

When the timer went off, I turned off the heat and ladled the hot juice into the hot jars, sealed them, turned the heat back up and waited for the canner to come back up to temperature. I processed them for 10 minutes. The jars are now cooling on my pantry shelf. 

Hopefully, they'll gel overnight and I'll have some beautiful jelly tomorrow!

Meanwhile, I have to decide what to do with the not-set batch of jelly and spread from the other day. I might leave the not-set jelly alone -- it's just cherry syrup now, which is useful for many things (not the least of which is as a topping for ice cream or pancakes!) -- but I might make another batch of crock pot cherry butter from the not-set pulp spread. 

We'll see!

Foraging for Free Fruit - and making yummy stuff with it

I recently found the Falling Fruit website (they also have a mobile app, which I've known about for a while), which is a crowd-sourced interactive map of edible things that are accessible to foragers and gleaners. Falling Fruit itself is a non-profit organization and they describe themselves:

Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. By quantifying this resource on an interactive map, we hope to facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods. Not just a free lunch! Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.

Many edible things grow in California. I know MANY people who have citrus trees in their yard or accessible in their neighborhoods. There are also lots of fruit trees in business parking lots, or in tree lawns next to roads. In most jurisdictions, any fruit that hangs over a sidewalk or other public thoroughfare is legally free to the world (check your area's laws -- IANAL!), and in many places the property owner or business is willing to let foragers/gleaners come onto their property and take the fruit -- this is especially true if you ask nicely and offer to share it with them. NOTE: some people have their own plans for their fruit, so remember Wheaton's Law and "Don't Be A Dick"™about it. 

It all started last week, when Bri & I stopped by the church to drop something off. When I got out of the car, I noticed a bunch of fruit on the ground under the decorative trees in the parking lot. They were sour cherries! I got an empty box from inside the church and we picked a few pounds of cherries from the lower branches of two trees -- and there are several more trees in and around the parking lot, so there's plenty more fruit for the birds and any other foragers/gleaners in the area. I've been making sour cherry syrup, jelly, and butter with the fruit -- I'll publish another post with more details about that, as I learned a few things along the way & don't want to forget!

Then on Saturday, on the way back from Synod Assembly in Palm Desert, Pastor Matt dropped me off at Bri's Amazon facility so I could ride back home with her. There were still a few hours until she got off work, so I drove over to the local library to hang out for a while. On the way back to AMZ, I passed a big citrus grove. There were "Private Property - No Tresspassing" signs up, but several of the trees were either outside the fence, or had heavily-laden branches that hung out over the road, so those are fair game. Plus, to be honest, I think it's an abandoned grove, as there were old tires lying around and SO MUCH FRUIT on the ground -- I don't think anybody is tending the grove anymore. It's in an area zoned for light industrial, so the property is probably just waiting to be developed. Such a shame for all that fruit to be wasted, but I can only take so much with me.

It was after finding this grove that I remembered the Falling Fruit website. I subsequently posted the grove onto the map for others to find.

After church on Sunday, the ever-patient Brianne and I went on a drive to some of the sites that were in the high desert. We went to a fig tree in Hesperia that had a LOT of unripe fruit on it. It has several branches that hang over the sidewalk, so I'm planning to keep my eye on it and hope to get some fruit from it in the near future.

Then we drove out to a nearby reservoir where there were several Hollyleaf Cherry plants on a publicly-accessible hillside. They're still flowering, so we'll go back later once the plants set fruit.

On Monday, we had some errands to run down the hill. Falling Fruit showed some nearby fruit trees, so we went to check them out, too. There was a lemon tree that the map said was out in the open with no fence or anything, but we found it was in somebody's yard and was trimmed so that nothing hung out over the sidewalk, so we left it alone. However, as we drove down the road a bit further, we found a guy trimming an orange tree -- there were a bunch of branches with fruit on the ground all around him, so I stopped and asked if I could have the fruit. He said yes -- and I got more than a dozen oranges!

On the way to another tree in the area, we passed a business that had a big fruit tree out in front of their parking lot, overhanging the sidewalk, so I asked Bri to make a U-turn (OK, it was more like, "OMG, turn around! There's a big fruit tree back there!!"). It was a big loquat tree! I took some fruit from the sidewalk side of the tree, then went inside the business to ask them if I could pick some fruit from the parking lot side, and they said yes! I also added this tree to the Falling Fruit map.

After that, we continued on to the tree we were actually looking for when we saw the loquats. This tree was a mulberry tree which I was excited about because I'd never seen mulberries before. The fruit had mostly fallen off the tree and was spread out on the ground and on the sidewalk. I managed to only get about a handful of unblemished fruit. I'll try to get back there earlier next year and hope to get some more usable fruit. For now, I'll probably combine the mulberries in with the loquats when I make some jam or whatever from them.

Closer to home, the prickly pear cactuses are starting to bloom! They didn't bloom very much last year or the year before because it was so dry, but this winter was so wet that they are blooming like gangbusters now (and it's still raining occasionally, which also helps). It promises to be a good year for prickly pear fruit! They ripen later in the year, so I'll keep my eye on them and try to get to them before the birds do, LOL. We have a number of them on our property, including a couple right up next to the road which stick out of our fence and so are publicly-accessible. There's also a big bunch of them along a nearby road. I added both ours and the others to the Falling Fruit map, along with several juniper bushes that are just about everywhere around here. (Juniper berries are excellent for cooking. I like to use them in mustards and in fermented sauerkraut.)

Anyway, that's just what we've found in the past few days. I'll be down in San Diego County this coming weekend and will check the map to see what I can find down there.

PS. the juniper bushes on our property are COVERED in berries!