Summer lovin': My plums, food trips and blogs to remember

Here's my plum tree humming with bees in spring. Missed my plum harvest this summer but Doug picked 8 or 9 pounds and froze them. Made one batch of vanilla bean plum preserves and my favorite plum upside down cake from Ruth Reichel's The Gourmet Cookbook and still have half the harvest in my freezer. Two remarkable food trips of the summer- neither necessarily new to foodies but new and lovely to me: Momofuku's ssam and milk bars in NYC in July and then today Humphrey Slocumbe's ice cream parlor. We had burnt butter, salted chocolate and the especially nice Irish Breakfast: vanilla ice cream with bourbon and cornflakes. Question: what's with the salt? Seems like it goes hand-in-hand with avant garde food. In any case, it worked today after a foggy morning at Ocean Beach. Two food revolution blogs to follow and fantasize about the days when I can hit all the Slow Food/ and Forage events around the country right at peak harvests: Forage Oakland and two recommended by my best friend Julie: Sweet Beet and Splendid Table.