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.

A New (for us) Recipe: Blackberry Blueberry Jam

Happy 4th of July everyone! Americans anyway. I guess to anyone else, Happy Monday that happens to be the 4th of July!

So, the fruit started rolling in back in June with the strawberries. With the wet, soggy, grey spring that we had, our strawberry crop was just enough for my breakfast and lunches. I can go through a pound of strawberries a day by myself when they are fresh-from-our-bushes-picked berries. Mmmm, Vitamin C! Sadly, cherry season was super short due to the spring that we had, and we missed out on going to our local orchard to pick those (super bummed, as those are my all-time favorite fruit, but I am working on getting my husband to plant us our own cherry trees. We'll see if I get those or the dishwasher first...)

So now we are on to blueberries and blackberries. Our blueberries are a later variety, so it will be a few more weeks until they are ripe, but Colleen and I did go up the road this weekend and pick their early variety. Our blackberries are doing really well this year! We've been getting a 2-4 pints a day. And they are super, super sweet!

Blueberries that we picked locally, and our blackberries.

It was a rainy day, so a good one to be in the kitchen making jam. We made a batch of just blackberry jam, and I had to adjust the next recipe and cut waaaay down on the sugar, because the first jam was so sweet. (Those berries are sweet!) Ice cream topping anyone?

Several years ago, my mom bought me the "Farm Journal's Freezing and Canning Cookbook." I LOVE this book! It has so many recipes, and combinations that I would never think of, such as blackberry and blueberry jam (other people may think of these things, which I am sure you can look up on the internet now, but when you are busy picking and picking and weeding and feeding animals and also have a fractured foot, it is easier sometimes to just be able to flip through a book and have a the recipes right at your fingertips). It also has recipes for green tomatoes, pickled everything (even fruit!) and meats. The other thing that I really like about this book is that the recipes are for large quantities of fruit, such as pounds and bushels (which is what we tend to have around here) rather than cups and pints (which is generally what I find when I look online, although not always). So, if you are going to seriously get into canning, I would recommend that you look for a copy of this book.

Blackberry-bluberry jam - final product!