#canning

#canning

When summer hits its stride, the sight of plump, dusky plums fill the grocery stores, and it's glorious, although fleeting. We can keep those luscious fruits ready to eat all winter long by simply canning them in hot liquid. Whether your plums are golden or deep purple in hue, these faintly-floral fruits are all shades of juicy, sweet, and tart. Savor those summer flavors like this: Start by washing them and pricking the skins with a fork.

Martinis take center stage when we see a 1950s-era dinner party on television, but there was a much more wholesome trend that's lesser known today: the fruit juice cocktail. The "cocktail" simply refers to the mixture of different juices or actual fruits, and not to alcohol. The thinking at the time was that this was an innocent, healthy-ish way to refresh people and get their appetites fired up, kind of like a booze-less version of the Italian aperitivo happy hour with appetite-stimulating spritzes.