Cherries!

Last weekend we made cherry jam. We had several pounds of cherries to work with. I am not exactly sure how many. We had originally picked sixteen pounds of cherries (to give you an idea of quantity - this completely filled our fruit drawer), but several pounds were eaten before we got to the jam-making stage. We like our cherries!

This year I finally broke down and purchased a food mill. So many people kept telling me that I should get one. We had borrowed one before, and it was great and saved lots of time, but I never really thought I needed one until I was staring down pounds and pounds of cherries and blueberries (we had also picked 11 pounds of blueberries on our outing - those I made into freezer jam for convenience).

My daughter, who has had a keen interest in cooking shows for several years, jumped all over the food mill. I think the only thing that I was allowed to do with it was clean it.

Our new food mill.

Unfortunately, I did not realize that it didn't pit the cherries, so that was A PROBLEM. Do you know how few stores in rural areas sell cherry pitters? We do. That was several hours on a Saturday morning. We eventually found a swiss-army kitchen tool thing (below) that pits cherries, cores apples, does something to strawberries and also zests things and I don't even know what else. It actually worked quite well.

The swiss army kitchen tool.

Colleen and I had quite the system going - she would use the food mill to process the cherries after I cleaned and pitted them. Then we got them cooking and canned. So blueberries and cherries are done, now we get to move on to the raspberries and blackberries.

Jars of cherry jam.