Cherry madness
Jul 27th, 2009 by Amy
This week has been cherry madness in our house. We ended up canning 16 half pints of cherry jam, several pints of cherry dessert sauce, drying some, and still yet making two half gallons of cherry sherry and one half gallon of cherry vinegar. As Matt mentioned in his previous post, cherries are my favorite fruit, so I guess all of this craziness makes some sense. I still plan on making some sour cherry jam.
I eat the cherry (and sour cherry) jam mixed with homemade yogurt throughout the winter and Matt puts it on english muffins. The cherry dessert sauce is a new one for us - but we have high hopes that it will be perfect over a scoop of vanilla ice cream. The cherry sherry is another new experiment. I made strawberry sherry last year and it was amazing. Hopefully the cherry sherry works out as well. I only wish that it was easier to say - cherry sherry doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Next up is pickled baby carrots. I found the most amazing baby carrots (not the weird, nubby things in bags in the grocery store) grown by a local farmer, Herman Hemke of Quality Acres in Coburg, OR. In addition to baby carrots, he also sells the most beautiful multi-colored carrots. The man knows his carrots! You can buy them at Eugene Local Foods.
We missed cherry season here with all the rain - I am very very envious of all those cherries you enjoyed! I’ll trade you cherries for peaches, lol (kidding of course). How do pickled carrots taste? I’m exploring various kinds of picked veg and haven’t really tried much before. So far I canned pickled green beans and cauliflower (and the traditional cucumber pickles of course)…. how do you use the pickled carrots?
This will be our first year pickling carrots, but I absolutely love just about any kind of pickle, so am sure they will be a big hit here. We will eat them kind of like we eat our pickled green beans and pickled asparagus - on an appetizer plate or out of the jar when we come home from work!
We have blueberry madness going on at our house. We picked 7 lbs of blueberries on Sunday. Froze most of them, but I still have a few pounds that I need to “process” this week. Waiting for the weather to cool down so I can make a blueberry pie, blueberry muffins and maybe blueberry jam.
Ahh, we left all our yearly gallons of blueberries there in Eugene. How I miss those.