When Life Gives You Cherries...

Okay, I guess I'm mixing my idioms there, but I thought it sounded good. A couple days ago I took home from work at the co-op an entire case of cherries. Each bag had several moldy cherries in it and it wasn't acceptable for sale, so the co-op got credit and I got to take them home. For free! Well, except for the hours of labor and $20 worth of rum and the cost of the sugar and canning jars that it took to make Rumtopf (photo below) and jam.George and I picked them over for moldy ones, which we fed to the compost. Briefly, we thought about freezing the moldy ones for future chicken feed but found out online that mold kills chickens fast! Good to know...We washed the good ones in a sinkful of water with a few drops of 35% hydrogen peroxide added into it (thanks to Jess for sending us the H2O2 as a produce wash, btw). Then Rose and I pitted them with paper clips. Super easy technique, but hard on the back and fingers. Rose lasted 1/2 an hour and earned 50 cents for it. That half hour was more fun and went faster than the next 45 minutes or so, when I worked alone at the rest of it. Rose does a great job and was so fun to talk to. We took pictures of ourselves...
(As an aside, we listened to this online radio station while we worked, High Lonesome Sound. Rose doesn't love it, but I do. We're gettin' ready for the Bluegrass Festival, ya know.)

The Rumtopf was easy. I basically followed this recipe (which is so simple it's hardly a recipe), but only with cherries for now. I'll try and add blueberries and raspberries later. Maybe some strawberries and gooseberries too. We're really looking forward to eating this on ice cream in a few months. And to giving some away...taking names for whoever wants some now...I don't think we'll need a gallon of it, but then you never know. We'll see how good it is.

The cherry jam recipe I found here. This too was easy, but a little disappointing in that 3 pounds of cherries only gave me seven 1/2 pints of jam. I didn't know if I'd like cherry jam as I'd never had it before, but oh my gosh is it good. With a little homemade yogurt cream cheese on a slice of my homemade whole wheat bread, it's heaven!

I couldn't get Elijah to help with the cherry pitting, but he sure does love eating the cherries. We've saved a bunch for fresh eating, too. After all, isn't that what seasonal food is for? Actually eating it in season and not just putting it up for later? Sometimes I forget that.

And I didn't mind Eli not helping in the kitchen so much. He's put in a few hours in the garage with dad lately, building this:

Just take an old ping pong table...