Made from Scratch - Bohemian Plum Dumplings

Riding bike through town recently, I passed a beautiful plum tree full of ripe luscious plums. Damson plums, or Italian Prune Plums : They're smaller than the regular plums you see in the grocery stores. They also have thicker skins.

I'd include a photo of that tree, here, but I haven't been able to find it again ... Sigh!

Here's a picture of the plums we purchased :
You can only get these in the fall. Most other years, we have plum dumplings in September. But things seem to be about 2 weeks early this year ... Global Warming?

Plum Dumplings in the fall is a family tradition for me. It's one of those recipes handed down by doing--no one really ever wrote it down. Gramma Pickles finally bought me a little cookbook from their Bohemian Life Insurance Group that had similar traditional recipes in it (Recipes that used "oleo" instead of butter or margarine.)

Here's the recipe :

Plum Dumplings (Sveskove Knedleky)
2 c. flour
dash of salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1/2 cup water
14-16 Stanley prune plums

Toppings :
Cottage Cheese
Melted Butter
Cinnamon and Sugar

Mix ingredients together to make dough that will handle easily. Wrap around fruit, covering all holes. Roll into balls. Drop into boiling water and boil 12-15 minutes. When they rise, turn them over in the boiling water. Serve topped with cottage cheese, yogurt, melted butter, and cinnamon sugar.
Here are the dumplings awaiting the boiling water (above).

Here are the plum dumplings in the boiling water. "Look, Ma! No sinkers!"

You just hope you don't have any "sinkers" when you put the dumplings into the boiling water. You want all of your dumplings to float. If you get one that doesn't float, you probably don't want to eat it--it'll be that heavy in your gut, too. When they're done, dinner is served! We eat them with cottage cheese or yogurt, plenty of melted butter, cinnamon and sugar :

Plum Dumplings are the ultimate in comfort food! Bet you wish your computer had smell-o-vision about now, don't you!

We'd have contests to see who could eat the most--evidenced by how many prune pits were left on a person's plate. The winner got a new car--well, not really, but that's what we always said. Usually, it was Grappa ate the most.