Cooking 101: A Dried Plum IS a Prune

B and I took to the grocery store the night before Valentine's Day in order to get the ingredients I needed to make Coq au Vin, a delicious french dish of chicken and vegetables in a yummy red wine sauce that needs to marinate overnight before browning and simmering for about 90 minutes. The recipe calls for dried herbs and fruit, so once you buy the chicken (about $7.50 for a whole bird), you're really about done.

So we have everything we need... onion, carrot, spices, chicken... when B and I realize we need "pitted dried plums," so off we headed to the dried fruit section where we found every dried fruit known to man, but no plums! Apricots, pineapple, banana, prunes, and about ten types of raisins taunted us for about 10 minutes until B had a revelation. "Wait," he said, "aren't dried plums called 'prunes'?" So we had to peek through the ingredients to figure out that, yes, he was absolutely right and that the roughly 20 people that walked by, overhearing our conversation during those 10 minutes must've thought we were crazy.

Oh well, we bought our prunes (feeling quite old, for some reason) and headed out. In the future, I'd suggest that these editors call a spade a spade, or at least a prune a prune.