Cherries, cherries and more cherries

Jeff has a friend at work with a sour cherry tree (pie cherries). This friend asked Jeff if we wanted to come over and pick the cherries because they had no use for them and he'd just have to pick them up off the ground. We thought that it would be fun.

Saturday morning we went to pick cherries. We've never done this before and I didn't know what to expect. It was actually a lot of fun. We picked most of the cherries but had a hard time picking the top middle. We ended up with about 3/4 of a bushel of cherries.

Emma and I set out to pit these little guys. I thought it would be a whole lot harder than it was. We bought two different cherry pitters from Ace Hardware and the simple one seemed to work the best. I ended up just using a hairpin and that worked great. While we were pitting, a friend of Emma's called and when Emma told her she had to pit cherries, Ashley thought that would be fun so Ashley joined the pitting party. We actually had fun.

Our church was having its Fourth of July picnic this weekend so I had a brilliant idea to make a pie with all that bounty. I made two - one for us and one for church. They were beautiful with a lattice top and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. They tasted terrible. Not just a bit bad, awful. They were runny and not sweet enough. Ugh. Oh well, I'm glad I made two and we tasted one before I took the other to church.

When the girls got back from their movie we tried terrible pie and then made jam. I have this marvelous Pamona's pectin that you can reduce or even skip the sugar if you wanted to. We made a jam with it that tasted like cherry pie.

Cherry Pie Jam (yield 4-5 cups)

4 cups pitted and mashed sour cherries
2 cups sugar
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp almond extract
2 tsp Pomona's pectin
2 tsp calcium water

Measure sugar, cinnamon and pectin into a bowl. Mix well and set aside.

Measure cherries and calcium water into pan and stir well. Bring to a boil. Add sugar mixture; continue to cook and stir vigorously for 1-2 minutes to dissolve pectin. Return to boil and remove from heat. Stir in almond extract.

Fill hot, sterilized jars. Screw on 2 piece lids. Process 5 minutes in BW bath.This was a softer set. It was very much like cherry pie. Add more pectin and calcium water if you like it set firmer. You can double or triple this recipe.

I used the open kettle method for sealing the jars but I'm thinking I will do the BW bath next time since I'm using less sugar. I froze the rest of the cherries and will make more jam this week.