I Had Two Things On My Mind: Baking Bread and Making Jelly

When Friday hit, I had two things on my mind that I wanted to accomplish this weekend.  One was to bake some of my Focaccia Bread and the other was to prepare my plums for making jelly.

At our lake house we have plum, pear and apple trees.  The apple and plum tree limbs just practically hang to the ground each year with fruit.  If it is not picked quickly enough, the birds will begin to eat it, therefore, this year, I decided to get as much of it picked as possible and try my hand at a little jelly making.

 Since Ryan and Allison are living at the lake house right now, I will get text messages that look like this!

                                                                             And this.

                               Justin also lives in Natchitoches so he goes over to pick fruit also.

And Sarah takes Parker Ann to pick plums too!  You get the point now don't you?!  We've got a LOT of plums!

I started talking about getting the juice out of these plums for my jelly and Hubby had a GREAT idea; use the juicer!

There couldn't be a simpler way to get the juice from all those plums.  You just throw the whole fruit in and...

                                                              You've got plum juice!

We froze this juice so it wouldn't go bad before we got to make the jelly and there is still more plum picking going on so we will be adding to it.  I did purchase some of the items I will need for this canning though...

Once the plums had been prepared, I moved on to my bread baking.  I wanted to make my Focaccia Bread (recipe) so Hubs and I could have sandwiches for dinner...

                                       Slice the bread up so it can be used for sandwiches.

                                                    Roast a bell pepper for the sandwich.

I added some Provolone Cheese, Prosciutto and slices of the roasted red pepper and then placed it in a heated skillet to press.

          I pulled out this bottle of Spanish wine I bought this week to go with our sandwiches.

                               This was better than any sandwich I've had in a restaurant!

And while I was doing the things I had on my mind to accomplish for the weekend, I thought of something else.  We were going to have a house full of people for Sunday lunch so I started a pot roast...

And then thought...How good would some homemade yeast rolls be with this?  So, I hopped over to my Pinterest Food Board (recipe) and found a recipe to try out...

OH MY GOODNESS!  These yeast rolls were definitely a success and I'm pretty sure I will NEVER buy packaged rolls again.

I would say that I pretty much accomplished what I set out to do this weekend plus some!  Oh...and did I mention that between all of this I went to a wedding on Saturday evening, attended church Sunday morning and played in the swimming pool all afternoon afterwards.  Happy, Happy weekend down here in the south!