Saturday, June 26, 2010

Cherries!!!

I picked up 18 lbs of cherries from Happy Girl Kitchen yesterday and they are very high quality! I think I might have found 10 cherries that were damaged in the whole box. Not bad at all. So far I've made 1 cherry pie, 2 trays of dried cherries, and 17 jars of preserves in a 10:1 water to honey syrup. I used my new Weck jars that arrived just in time for the cherries. I purchased the jars from Peaceful Valley Farm and they have several sizes - the one in the picture is a smaller "tulip" jar. These Weck jars are BPA-free and prettier than the standard Ball jars that we usually see in the US. I thought they took a little bit more time to process than Ball jars, but all of the 17 that I've done so far sealed just fine. (You can tell that they are sealed when the orange tab points slightly downward.)
The other gadget that made all of this work much easier is my Oxo cherry pitter. I usually think that most gadgets are not worth the space that they take up in the kitchen drawer. But this one is definitely worth it, if you plan on doing a lot of cherries. It was $15 from Bed Bath and Beyond. And, yes, your fingers will look as "dirty" as mine after you've done 10 lbs of cherries :)

But look what you'll have in the end:

4 comments:

Terra said...

The cherries in your special new jars are gorgeous works of art, and the cherry pitter seems necessary when you are using so many cherries.
How delicious looking!

heather @ what's blooming this week said...

"There's nothing like spending the day in the kitchen to produce something so lovely as these little gems. I can almost taste them.

Sylvana said...

I love cherries, but can't grow the sweet ones here. I feel the same way as you about kitchen gadgetry. I usually will only have something if it can do at least double duty, or I use it ALL THE TIME. I would totally allow the space in my kitchen for the cherry pitter simply because how else are you going to get all those pits out?

Jackie said...

Thanks, Terra and Heather.

Sylvana, yes, I determined that there was absolutely no other way to get those cherry pits out!