Gardening

First off, some photographic evidence of cherry picking and meeting mallorys_camera!

I didn't realize, until I arrived at Samascott, that you can also rent out Surreys there. This gives me lots of Ideas for future visits.



When I paid the picking entry fee and the person working there handed me the list of what's available, I was dismayed to see that cherries had been scratched off the list! After asking her about that, the person working there said, "They're pretty much gone but you can try and pick whatever you can get."

I found a couple rows of sour cherries, and this is what many of the trees looked like:



If you look closely, you'll notice there are lots of beautiful red cherries towards the top of the tree, and basically none lower down. It looks like people went for all the easy pickins, probably over the Fourth of July weekend, leaving only the fruit towards the top. Well, dear readers, it was a good day to be a fairly tall person. And also a person willing to walk towards the end of the row.

I did try going up a ladder once, although it wasn't positioned especially well and my feet informed me that I was definitely NOT wearing shoes with metal shanks in them.



On the other hand, I was wearing a brand-new leafcutter ant dress, and it was an excellent choice of apparel for cherry-picking on a warm summer day. (though I hesitate to recommend this particular dress to others because some of the stitching was very poorly done and I'll have to resew parts of it momentarily).

It saddened me to see that there are a lot of people who don't seem to fully grasp the concept of u-pick produce.



But at least we could console ourselves with ice cream. As you can see from this photo, both P and I have impeccable taste when it comes to outfits for cherry picking and/or gardening.



After returning home, what to do with all the fruit?? I managed to pick nearly 17 pounds of sour cherries, mostly without the stems, so processing needed to commence immediately.

But also, it was Hot, hotter still because S was doing some cooking in the kitchen.

So after washing a bunch of the cherries, I retreated to the basement to pit them.



Here is what 16 pounds' worth of cherry pits looks like:


Not pictured: the amount of cherry juice all over my legs and on the floor where I worked.

I saved the final pound for making some Luxardo maraschino cherries.



The making of the Luxardo maraschino cherries was highly satisfying on multiple different fronts, all at once.

The first front is that I never, ever intended to buy a bottle of Luxardo in the first place! I had gone to a liquor store at some point, in search of decent kirschwasser, and the person working there pointed me at the Luxardo instead. I figured I'd take the gamble, and, dear reader, I very much lost. Luxardo is very much NOT kirsch. Good kirsch is very hard to find. Frankly, I find the Luxardo horrifyingly sweet. So, not only is is NOT kirsch, it is impossible to use in any sort of large quantity.

Except if one is making Luxardo maraschino cherries, which are cloyingly sweet by design.



With this batch, I was able to finish off that damn bottle of Luxardo, for once and for all.

The second satisfying element is that Luxardo maraschino cherries call for a stick of cinnamon, and I have some top-notch cinnamon sticks from my Sri Lankan rowing teammate (who also points out that much of what gets sold as cinnamon, isn't actually cinnamon). One went in and it smelled fantastic.



The third satisfying element is that recently, a couple other rowing teammates were discussing how one teammate's significant other is exceptionally good at mixing up Old Fashioneds. When I asked him about why he thought his Old Fashioneds were particularly good, one of his comments was that he used Luxardo maraschino cherries in them, along with other fruits.

And so! One of the two jars I made will go to him, for feedback, and also because it's satisfying to give someone exactly the Right Thing. Especially when the Right Thing contains some of the liqueur I've been wanting to get rid of for ages. A very good use for some of these cherries!

By the way, here is the recipe I used for the Luxardo maraschino cherries:

-Combined 1/2 C sugar and 1/2 C water in a saucepan, along with a cinnamon stick and 1/4 tsp nutmeg. Bring to a simmer, then add 1 pound cherries and 1 C Luxardo. Simmer for 5 minutes, then allow to cool. Put in jars and store refrigerated.

Meanwhile, some other things done with the sour cherries:

Three gallon ziploc bags into the deep freeze. Naturally, S now says he would love a cherry pie. I might be inclined to wait before turning on the oven for that project. The cherries will keep in the deep freeze until the time is right.

Pitting the cherries released some extra juice, which I recaptured, because I've learned of another fine cocktail involving cherries, from annikusrex, originally with Maker's Mark, ginger ale, and sour cherry juice. My modified version uses whiskey (that's what's on hand), a dry ginger ale (lower sugar), and the extra cherry juices from the pitted cherries.



So refreshing!

I am also experimenting with homemade dried tart cherries. Here's how they're looking after ~18 hours in the dehydrator:



I'm really hoping the dried tart cherry experiment goes well. If it does, I could very well go back for even more sour cherries in a future year. Dried tart cherries go very well in muesli.