OK, I am on the hunt for your favourite cherry recipe.
I have started picking 2 trees and have another 5 trees ripening as I write..... I have put at least 6kg in the freezer and given away another 2 kg.
I love cherries, which is just as well, but apart from jam, and crumble, there must be some other great recipes out there.
Oh yes, and when they're finished I've got 4 fig trees...... :0)
When we moved here nearly 2 years ago, we had bad frosts so there wasn't a lot of fruit. However, this year everything is growing like Topsy!!! I am certainly not ungrateful, but I don't want to keep putting it all in the freezer for later and then not doing anything with them.
The garden is certainly taking up my time at the moment, still trying to get the kitchen finished and the living room......I don't seem to have had a lot of time for quilting lately either........
i loooooove cherrys. i could fly over and help you eat lots of them. :) ya cant beat a great cherry pie. maybe not be very imaginative but simple is often best. j.
"Janner" wrote ... OK, I am on the hunt for your favourite cherry recipe.
I have started picking 2 trees and have another 5 trees ripening as I write..... I have put at least 6kg in the freezer and given away another 2 kg.
I love cherries, which is just as well, but apart from jam, and crumble, there must be some other great recipes out there.
Oh yes, and when they're finished I've got 4 fig trees...... :0)
When we moved here nearly 2 years ago, we had bad frosts so there wasn't a lot of fruit. However, this year everything is growing like Topsy!!! I am certainly not ungrateful, but I don't want to keep putting it all in the freezer for later and then not doing anything with them.
The garden is certainly taking up my time at the moment, still trying to get the kitchen finished and the living room......I don't seem to have had a lot of time for quilting lately either........
Do you live anywhere near a shelter for battered women or the homeless or some other place that provides meals to the indigent? They might be absolutely delighted to have any and all extra fruit, and may even bring people out to help pick!
Fill a large Kilner/Le Parfait style jar with pitted cherries. Fill up the gaps with sugar. Leave over night... Fill the gaps up again with brandy. Shake well to get all the bubbles out, and top up to full. Put one of those plastic things you can get in to keep the fruit down under the surface.
Shake every two or three days for a week, and then leave until Christmas. Use the fruit for making things like cherry and brandy ice cream, Black Forrest Cherry Cake, and the like, and drink the juice as an alcofrolic crimble beverage...
Then start another jar, at least a gallon, and without the sugar, and toss in more spare fruit all summer long. Be generous with the brandy. Voila! tutti-frutti.
You could use it this coming winter, but the one after would be better.
A good many people around here have pitters, because cherries are rather abundant in this area.
If you don't have them in a quantity to make that a worthwhile investment, just halve them and slide the meat off the pits with the knife. Most properly ripe cherries that works just fine for. Some of the sour cherries take more work, and my shrub cherries I usually cook and strain the pits out after. Shrub cherries have a LOT of flavor, but the pit to flesh ratio is not great.
Another alternative is a sharpened olive fork. I have seen some of the mamas and grandmamas around here just whiz through a basket of cherries with one, but I never had much luck with it.
Do you make danish pastry? If you don't you can make a sweet yeast croissant dough and use it the same way (it is very much the same thing), or you can use your favorite foundation sweet yeast dough recipe.
Lay a generous 1/4 inch (1/2 cm) base of dough in a fairly shallow sided baking pan running the dough 3/4 up the sides. Put a layer of cream cheese (or equivalent) softened with a little cream on the bottom. Put your cherries on top of the cheese. Weave a lattice of dough over the cherries, fastening the ends to the dough at the sides. Let rest for 15 minutes, then bake at proper temperature for your chosen dough until golden. That would be 375F to 400F for half an hour to 45 minutes with my recipes.
The amount of cherries and cheese are not really important. You can use plain raw cherries, or you can add sugar to taste, or you can make a cooked filling of them. It works any way you prefer.
This is a by guess and by golly recipe that I make whenever anyone remembers to get enough butter and cream cheese when fruit is in season. It vanishes quickly.
Another thing I do is to make custard tartlets and just put them on the table. An entire seasons worth of gooseberries and blackcurrents disappeared that way last year. The family just sprinkled on as much sugar as they fancied and piled on as much fruit as the tart could hold. DD3 really really likes blackcurrents.
Almost any fruit works with either thing.
There are buckles, butter a pan well, cover the bottom with fruit, sprinkle lightly with sugar, pour on yellow cake, bake as directed for the cake. Or put the cake in first, followed by the fruit, and then put dutch apple pie topping on top. Do the first method with an american biscuit recipe or a scone recipe instead of the cake and you have a cobbler.
Grunts (slumps for some reason when you do it with apples), are stewed fruit with fluffy dumplings on top. Add a spoonful of sugar to the dumplings if you wish. Particularly nice with cherries or peaches.
I do damson and sloe gin the same way. :) With the damsons and sloes, you leave for a year or two, and then just chuck the fruit. Cherries you don't leave so long, and you want to eat them! Start now, and they'll be ready for Christmas.
You just reminded me, we have tonnes of sloes in the gardening and they will be ready in probably a soon (have to keep an eye on them) and this year they are already huge!!
Sloe gin always sounds lovely, but I have a memory of being about 17/18 yrs old and my friend and I drinking too much gin!! as if, I hear you cry!!! and then the both of us sitting there crying for what seemed like hours for no apparent reason :0)
Sounds funny now that I've written down...
I think that there is a damson tree here as well, but there are only 3 on it :( and last 2 weeks my DF's tree died suddenly, no warning, yet it was looking the best that it has looked in years! It came from the UK where it did nothing and has been planted in the same spot here for 4 years and flourished then kaput. Well, I know what to buy him for his birthday now!
When I turned up lactose intolerant a couple of summers ago, I went on a sorbet binge. Never bothered with the almond crisp stuff, but this sorbet is rather nice!
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-- Kim Graham THE WORD > OK, I am on the hunt for your favourite cherry recipe.
Do you make danish pastry? If you don't you can make a sweet yeast croissant dough and use it the same way (it is very much the same thing), or you can use your favorite foundation sweet yeast dough recipe.
Lay a generous 1/4 inch (1/2 cm) base of dough in a fairly shallow sided baking pan running the dough 3/4 up the sides. Put a layer of cream cheese (or equivalent) softened with a little cream on the bottom. Put your cherries on top of the cheese. Weave a lattice of dough over the cherries, fastening the ends to the dough at the sides. Let rest for 15 minutes, then bake at proper temperature for your chosen dough until golden. That would be 375F to 400F for half an hour to 45 minutes with my recipes.
The amount of cherries and cheese are not really important. You can use plain raw cherries, or you can add sugar to taste, or you can make a cooked filling of them. It works any way you prefer.
This is a by guess and by golly recipe that I make whenever anyone remembers to get enough butter and cream cheese when fruit is in season. It vanishes quickly.
Another thing I do is to make custard tartlets and just put them on the table. An entire seasons worth of gooseberries and blackcurrents disappeared that way last year. The family just sprinkled on as much sugar as they fancied and piled on as much fruit as the tart could hold. DD3 really really likes blackcurrents.
Almost any fruit works with either thing.
There are buckles, butter a pan well, cover the bottom with fruit, sprinkle lightly with sugar, pour on yellow cake, bake as directed for the cake. Or put the cake in first, followed by the fruit, and then put dutch apple pie topping on top. Do the first method with an american biscuit recipe or a scone recipe instead of the cake and you have a cobbler.
Grunts (slumps for some reason when you do it with apples), are stewed fruit with fluffy dumplings on top. Add a spoonful of sugar to the dumplings if you wish. Particularly nice with cherries or peaches.
Have filled 3 jars with dark red cherries and brandy......
Now on to the next crop of cherries, apparently Rainier cherries - can I preserve these the same way? They are yellow and pink, very delicate flavour, I have 2 large bowls full of them and have another tree to pick that are dripping in them.......
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